Email
7: Friends and Neighbours (Fan) Community Alliance
Age: six years
Location: Neath Port Talbot, Wales
Why it started: Pure stubbornness. A small group of people wanted to rebuild the community spirit in a deprived urban area of Wales.
How many people are involved?
There are about 250 members, and about 50 of those volunteer to help out with different events and projects.
What happens?
Fan is all about friends and family, explains Emma Knight, one of the founders. It arranges social get-togethers, street parties, Fairtrade coffee mornings, or Halloween parties. They’ve also been putting a community garden into an area that was formerly a dead-end alley. The greenhouse in the garden is made out of plastic bottles collected by everyone in the street.
Fan has also organised monthly street cleanups, quarterly community skips, and taken part in Earth Hour.
Does the group get funding or other support?
Keep Wales Tidy funded a storage container so that Fan can reuse materials they buy for events. They have also provided support and back-up throughout. Fan was also supported by the Eden Project’s “Big Lunch”: “It’s our biggest event of the year, everyone comes out for it. If nothing else it gives the people on the street something to talk about and that reminds people about the work we do and keeps the momentum going,” says Knight. “Street parties are the way forward. They give you a chance to do the hardest part of setting up something like this; knocking on your neighbour’s door. People will say it’s not going to happen and people tried before and nothing came of it. Do not let that dampen your spirits. Battle on and people will come.”
Fan is now largely self-funding, through a fun day and a Bonus Ball raffle. “The money we make helps us to take other families on on some of the trips we run, when we started we’d fill a mini-bus and now when we go on trips there are three bus-loads of us. It’s really taken off in a big way! The Big Lottery gave us a grant but we are pretty self-sufficient now.
What can you do to help?
“In terms of support people can offer us it’s tricky,” says Knight. “We are not about growing bigger and bigger. We would love to see more communities setting up their own similar groups. The worry is that we will get to a point where we get too big and people end up feeling left out of isolated within that group. Every community will have a different thing they can focus on, for us it’s the children’s circus but for others it might be woodwork or anything. Go with what works in your community.”
How can I set something like this up in my area?
Keep Wales Tidy were particularly helpful for this group in providing both material and intellectual support.
On the Project Dirt website, you can set up a project page from where you can promote your community project and share information and resources with thousands of other members. They also sometimes run funding rounds on behalf of companies and can inform you about funding opportunities, including crowd funding and assist you in writing applications through advice or peer-to-peer support. Another potentially useful group is Neighbourly, a social network which connects community projects and charities with companies ready to help, such as Marks & Spencer and Starbucks. They don’t offer advice to community groups on the running of projects but they can offer advice and support around using the neighbourly platform.
If you want to apply for a grant, UK Community Foundations can help you to locate your local community foundation and give you advice about how to apply for a grant from them.
Groundwork is an extremely well-established group who provide know-how, tools and skills, mentoring and training depending on the local need of the community group as well as putting it in contact with partners. They can also advise you on how to source for money or run fundraisers and help you identify a wide range of funding opportunities such as local authorities, EU money, corporate funding, lottery grants etc. And there’s an incredibly useful guide on their website to setting up community projects which includes vital Top Tips and help with finding funding.
If you’re looking for help from local businesses, you can contact Business in the Community (BITC) to be in their books for when businesses are looking to get involved in philanthropic projects in your locality. The businesses usually provide community organisations with skill training, mentoring, volunteering or financial support. BITC can also help with advice on how to approach businesses for support.
So far in this series ...
1. The community supported farm
2. The bike repair co-operative
3. The community garden centre
5. The meat-rearing collective
This article is part of the Live Better Community Project month. In September, we are showcasing 17 community projects from around the UK. On Wednesday 24 September, we will ask you to vote for your favourite project. The project with the most votes will be awarded £1,000 of funding, and two runners-up will each receive funding of £500. One voter chosen at random will receive £150 worth of gift vouchers for Nigel’s Eco Store. Terms and conditions here.
With thanks to: 10:10; FOE; Project Dirt; Neighbourly; UK Community Foundations; Groundwork; Business in the Community; Federation of City Farms and Community Gardens; the Prince’s Trust; Garden Organic; the Royal Horticultural Society; the RSPB; Keep Wales Tidy; The Wildlife Trusts; and Mind.
Interested in finding out more about how you can live better? Take a look at this month’s Live Better challenge here.
The Live Better Challenge is funded by Unilever; its focus is sustainable living. All content is editorially independent except for pieces labelled advertisement feature. Find out more here.
;