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Sheena Cochrane: The Local Community Planning Team have helped us tremendously over the years. They've been there constantly helping us to fund resources, to fill in applications for grants...
Peter Burke: With the help of the Local Community Planning Team we actually established the Carnoustie Development Group. During the couple of years we've been running they've been supporting us by coming along to every meeting...
Ross Hendry: Mhairi Dickson from that team has got us set up, she's gotten us in contact with the parish and the church to use their hall, she's put me and my friends on courses for youth training, just a big help all round basically.
Bill Strachan: I see our job as being about supporting groups of local people from within communities
to clarify what it is that they actually want to achieve. They might have identified a particular issue but helping them to actually say ‘Well, what do we do about that issue?' and ‘Where is it we want to go with that issue?' and being clear about all that is really important and our team would help and support them to do that.
Sheena Cochrane: The Monifeith Eco Force is a group of local environmental enthusiasts; we got together a few years ago. It's a project that grew from the Local Community Planning Partnership that we used to have in Monifeith, a few like minded people got together thinking they'd like to enhance the environment and the look of Monifeith to make it a better place for us to live and for tourists to visit.
We do many things, from beach clean-ups – we have an annual program of beach clean-ups, we do conservation work in the Dighty valley: from tidying, picking up litter and planting, trying to re-introduce wild flowers up the Dighty valley, things like that.
The Local Community Planning Team have been a great help to us over the years, they've been tremendous in fact – giving us lots of help behind the scenes and physically as well, turning up to do... Liz comes along to do the beach cleans and various things like that. They give us a good bridge towards the council and put us in touch with all sorts of other agencies.
Bill Strachan: We'd also help them to get themselves organized as a group. It maybe sounds a bit boring but things like constitutions, bank accounts, having the right office bearers, all of that sort of thing is really, really important if they're going to be able to achieve access to external funding to deliver their project and the like.
The other thing that we would do is that we'd actually help them to identify the right people within the public, voluntary and wider community settings that they should be speaking to who would also have an interest in dealing with the issue or helping them to deliver the project that they see as being important to their community.
Peter Burke: The LCPT have been great supporters of the Carnoustie Development Group. Initially they helped us set up the group – it had come from two different sources and it needed to have its own constitution and it needed to have elected officers, so they facilitated that meeting, they facilitated the election and they made minutes of the actual meeting itself and they also helped create the constitution.
Since then, every month, in all the subsequent meetings we've had, they maintain a rolling action plan. Now this is a tremendous boon to us because what we do at the meeting is we have little sub groups who report on what they're doing and what they plan to do next. The LCPT maintain that for us; send a copy out to really make sure that people do follow up on their commitments, then at the following month that action plan is updated or the actions are put in abeyance or whatever's necessary.
The third thing that they do is they provide an avenue into Angus Council, so they have the ear and the email addresses more importantly of council officers, so when we need to contact people in the council we can go through themselves and they facilitate that entry as well.
Bill Strachan: It's important to understand the process of Local Community Planning is not a quick or an easy fix. Local Community Planning Teams have been in existence now for only two years, but it's a long-term process. Local communities, organizing themselves to help themselves, doesn't happen in a couple of days or a couple of weeks. People take time to gel as a group, and they need to have a number of learning experiences about how to attract external funding for example, and we've already managed to support a large number of groups to attract significant sums of external funding.
Harry Simpson: The West Links Development and Management Partnership was established by the Local Community Planning Team to help reverse the decline in tourist numbers to Arbroath and ultimately make it a more desirable place to visit.
The Local Community Planning Team and Angus Council and Arbroath and Area Partnership all work together in partnership and it has been a very successful working relationship over the number of years since I've been chair.
Angus Council managed to raise over £220,000 for this development to provide new street furniture, make improvements to the sea walls and develop a new slipway for pleasure vessels. And as you can see today, it is a wonderful project for the children and the area.
The partnership is made up of representatives of the public, the private the voluntary sectors and has developed a vision to enhance the west links area of the town, which will have a huge impact on visitor numbers and commercial opportunities in the future for Arbroath and surrounding area.
Bill Strachan: The work's wide-ranging. The types of projects we can get involved in are significant regeneration projects involving physical regeneration, through to working with groups of young people who are looking for something to positively contribute to their communities.
Ross Hendry: The group started when myself and a couple of my friends got in contact with the Local Community Planning Team, and we then got referred to Mhairi Dickson. She came out and had a meeting with us and it basically went off from there and the facility's been well used ever since the meeting.
Mhairi got us on board with the community grant scheme of Angus Council. She got the form and helped us fill that in. It was Mhairi who helped us get £1000 from Angus Council. It was a much-needed facility in Friockheim as there was nothing to do in the village, there was about a shop and that's it basically.
Friockheim Youth Drop-in Centre provides a safe environment for the young people of Friockheim to attend on a Wednesday evening, it keeps people from off the streets and we have table tennis, pool, darts, X-Box, Wii, a tuck shop serving hot and cold drinks and all the stuff's been donated to us or been funded to us.
The vision for the future is to have our own premises so we can have a facility for the young people of Friockheim more than one night a week. It's been massively supported by the local community - we've not had one bad word said about it – and obviously I'm not going to be here for ever, so I would like it to carry on when I'm away.
Bill Strachan: There is no quick or easy fix as I've said. Local Community Planning has already achieved significant successes in supporting community organizations to deliver things that they see as being important to themselves. And that's what we'll do and will continue to do that in the future. That'll be continuing to work with existing groups and organizations,
but as new groups and organizations emerge who want to improve their communities and improve their situations, we're always there to help them.
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