The Crieff Community Trust Steering group is thrilled to announce that we have received funding of £9,839 from Awards for All to develop a community action plan for Crieff. A Community Action Plan is an extremely important document for the development trust as it will provide the basis for the Trust’s work for the next five years.

A Community Action Plan is, in essence, a statement of the community’s priorities. It is created through a process of inviting people who live and work in Crieff to think about and talk about what they want for Crieff in the future. It is a crucial document to give to funding bodies when applying for grants for projects, since it provides the evidence to show what people think and what they want for our town.

Following a competitive tendering process, the Steering Group has now appointed Colin Roxburgh, of the Small Town and Rural Development Group, to help us with the action planning process. Colin has over 30 years experience of community regeneration in urban and rural communities across Scotland. Since 1998, he has helped more than 70 communities in Scotland to prepare Community Action Plans and he has helped establish and support over 50 Community Development Trusts.

During the next few weeks, Colin and his team of local interviewers will be talking to lots of people in Crieff, as well as key representatives from Perth & Kinross Council and other public and private sector organisations in the town, to get their views about the town and what they would like to see happen over the next five years.

The information gathered through these “stakeholder” interviews and focus groups — along with the information from the Community Survey carried out in 2010 and the Dundee University report published last year — will be presented at a Community Open Day at the end of September. More about the Open Day soon…!