Wednesday, October 06, 2010

Your money, your choice

During November there will be a series of ward based community funding events, where residents will be able to vote on funding for local projects.

‘Cleaner, Safer, Greener’ provides small grants to local community groups who have ideas for projects that help make their neighbourhood a better place to live. Projects can range from community clean-ups through to projects that help make communities safer or that bring people together.

Kensington and Fairfield has a total funding allocation of £8,975.00.

Decisions on the allocation of funds to the projects will be made via Participatory Budgeting (PB), a process whereby ward residents are invited to an event to vote on proposals submitted by groups within their ward. All applicants will be required to deliver a short 3 minute presentation on their proposal at the PB meeting and answer questions on their bids.

The deadline for applications for all those participating wards is 12 noon on Friday 15th October

For an application form and further details please contact The Grants Team at LCVS - the team are happy to help groups with support and advice on making their application so if you are interested in applying please call on 227 5177 or email grants@lcvs.org.uk

The event where you can vote for your preferred options, has been pencilled in for 9th November, probably at St Francis of Assisi Academy. Watch this space for more information.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

These events whilst well intentioned are deeply flawed.

How can it be right that the basis for allocation of Ward monies is based on which local group can rustle up the most residents to attend and vote for them.

A rubbish idea started by the failed last administration. They should be scraped.

Louise Baldock said...

Hello anonymous. I do have some sympathy with your views but we have moved on a long way since the last events and made several changes, which you may not be aware of.

One of the changes is that residents will be able to decide how to spend some of the Highway budget - I forget the figure, it might be around £8k, in the ward, and can choose to spend it on potholes, pavements, bins, benches, holes in entries etc. And they can nominate suitable locations at the same time.

Another change is that the bids will be assessed before they reach the event and ones that don't meet our new criteria wont be tabled at the event, this should rule out some of the problems we had last time too.

I suggest you come along and see what you think, I hope you will be pleased, but if you are still not happy then I would be happy to sit down with you and have a proper discussion, afterwards.

Cheers

Ken Dartford said...

Hi Louise

I live in Mossley Hill so you are not my patch

I have alreasy taken up my issues with Tina and Ron Gould

Thanks for the answer anyway

scouseboy said...

I really hope the improvement works. I had a bad experience of last year's event in my ward. I was one of the few local residents who had no affiliation to any one bid.
It turned out that the money ended up being divided by the two groups who could get the most young people there. Ironically, the bid that lost out was a presentation by the daughter of one of our councillors!

To make it a truly level playing field, therefore empowering the community, bidding organisations should be limited as to the amount of votes they have.