Praise for Community Toolkit
“Living in a remote place and finding examples of other local projects that have been successful in obtaining funding. We're not all by ourselves after all!”
Having benefited from Skye & Lochalsh’s Community Toolkit, a local volunteer was so pleased and impressed that she left this message on the Toolkit’s website forum.
This message is typical of the favourable feedback the Community Toolkit has been receiving since its inception three years ago. In essence, this facility is an online resource for community groups, providing them with useful information concerning such things as training, constitutions, funding, planning, legislation and how to proceed with a community appraisal. The Toolkit contains a vast but entirely accessible and readable array of useful information for volunteers and community organisations alike. The many appreciative messages from groups both locally and beyond Skye & Lochalsh are eloquent testimony to the fact that the Toolkit works and works well.
The Toolkit went “live” in July 2004 and is now averaging 7000 to 8000 users per month. Because it is available all day every day and can be accessed remotely, the facility overcomes problems of physical distance from administrative centres and thereby lessens rural isolation. Its organisers, Skye and Lochalsh Council of Voluntary Organisations (SLCVO) are now preparing fro the Toolkit’s second phase, which will build on the good work already done and make the service, including localised information and discrete site design, available to other parts of the country. Feedback from groups outwith Skye & Lochalsh suggest that this process is well underway already.
Chrisanne MacDonald of SLCVO is delighted with the facility’s development and is now looking to the future. "The Toolkit has developed way beyond our original aims and is now recognised as the best resource of its kind. We have had considerable interest from CVS's & other agencies across Scotland wishing to’ buy’ into our product and in the next phase of the project we hope that the potential of the facility, both here and elsewhere, is fully realised.”
A number of different agencies including LEADER+ have helped to fund this initiative. The original project budget was £88K over 3 years which included sponsorship from Portree based web developers <<sitekit>> and in kind contribution from SLCVO. Because of attributes such as an innovative approach to helping overcome issues of remoteness, the project was successful in attracting £44,000 LEADER+ funding.
http://toolkit.slcvo.org.uk/ |
