Community Links Fund 2016/2017

Leith Links Community Council has been running its very own participatory budgeting process. Originally, we had £15,500 of community grant money available (from a Scottish Government Community Empowerment grant), but by being frugal with admin costs we were able in the end to allocate £16,461.66 to fund projects.

Applications ran from 12/12/16 until 27/2/17, and 33 projects applied for funds totalling over £47,000 (if only we had that much available…)

Our social voting event took place on Saturday 11 March 2017,  in Leith St. Andrews Church Halls. We were delighted that loads of people came, and there was a real buzz as everyone got together and chatted about the projects. As well as all the great project teams,there were refreshments, a face painter for kids, and a great time was had by all!

192 people voted that day. Online voting was open from midday on 11 March until midday on Wednesday 15th March. A further 728 valid votes came in during that period, totalling 920 voters altogether.

In-person and online votes were added together and the results were announced on Thursday 16 March, at an ‘Awards Night’ event in the cafe at Leith Community Centre.

To view the Vote results, click here.

The awards cheques have all been distributed, and all the ‘winning’ projects are launched. They have until 31 March 2018 to complete their projects. Leith Links Community Council will be keeping in touch with the funded projects and will receive an ‘end of project’ report.

We would like to offer warmest congratulations to all of the successful projects, and look forward to keeping in touch and hearing how the projects develop. We offer regretful commiserations to those that did not manage to win funding on this occasion. We hope that getting together with members of the community and with other projects applicants at the social events was nevertheless a positive experience and that you will carry on thinking of other ways to find funding to take your project forward. £eith Decides is another possible source of funding, so we will undertake to keep you posted about how to apply to that. We will also pass on any other news or ideas about funding that come our way

To view the full list of applicants, and to view voting information, click here.

To read the Community Links Project Final Report submitted to Scottish Government, April 2017, click here (Warning – it’s 29 pages!)

Photos from Social Voting Event 11 March