Latest Opportunities To Help: May 2016

This is the first of the updates on how to help. I’ll put one main post per month and update that regularly as new opportunities arise or are completed…

Specific dates/times for help:

9th May: Meeting with Katie Hughes and Steve Dunlop to talk through the Linlithgow site, business plan and funding. Currently Iain Withers & Alastair Martin to attend.

12th May: Meet the Funders event will take place on Thursday 12 May 2016 in the Council Headquarters Waverley Court, 4, East Market Street, Edinburgh from 5pm to 8pm. This will be a good opportunity to put the project to funders and assess our eligibility to a lot in one go. Another body or two to attend this would be appreciated…

Behind The Scenes:

a) The Business Plan: We need to get a solid business plan together for the moorings and have to present elements of it to Scottish Canals on 9th May. This will also help set costs and help us work out how much we need to charge for customers. The obvious goal is to make these moorings cheaper and better, and getting the numbers right will tell us if the moorings can be cheaper and by how much so we can then decide how much we want to charge customers. I’ve kicked off a spreadsheet to try and get the numbers together, if you could have a look and comment or get in touch with anything on there i’ve forgotten or if you can find some helpful numbers: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1oo9kRMQKz41Gsty8rvHv1QKeGwMva-JbJy6RmCibnHs/edit?usp=sharing

b) Site assessments: As i am pretty much fully committed to getting the Linlithgow site up and running, it will need to fall to other people to help assess other potential sites for community moorings. It was suggested that Twechar would be a very good first site. If someone is willing to further assess that site, please get in touch and we can coordinate that.

c) Rules, regulations, terms etc etc. We will need to create our policies and procedures for how the moorings are used. So for now collating other similar info from other moorings or similar projects would be really useful. For example: conditions of mooring, rules/regs in terms of visitor mooring useage, procedures for dealing with any potential conflicts.

On The Ground:

Soon there will hopefully be a flurry of activity again on the Linlithgow field site as and when the grass has been sown. I will update this post with latest ‘work parties’ or opportunities to graft on site.

Resources to look out for:

As i am pretty much skint, it would be really useful if you could all look out for cheap or free supplies of the following. These aren’t strictly for the moorings themselves, but for the farming project as well so this is more of a personal favour really, but will help the project move forwards anyway. Once we know what structures we are going to build for the moorings themselves, we can get searching for these materials. For now, could you look out for:

  1. Concrete slabs and aggregate/type 1/gravel to help put in a roadway and parking at the field entrance
  2. Timber to help build a shed/workshop on site
  3. Slabs or other rockery for paths around the site
  4. ‘Pretty things’ 🙂 Erm, so a bit vague but ideas for nice seating, decoration,landscaping etc on site
  5. Flowers/plants/trees to plant up on site
  6. A mini-digger and/or rotavator to help with groundworks

 

 

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