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North Lanarkshire Community Composting Partnership |
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Thursday, 21 June 2007 |
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The project proposal was to develop a new project - North Lanarkshire Community Composting Partnership - which would involve five community groups across North Lanarkshire in developing composting facilities appropriate to their own community.
Overview
The initial applicant for this project was North Lanarkshire Forward. However, the project was taken on and has since been delivered by BTCV since mid 2005 when North Lanarkshire Forward was disbanded.
Plan
The project idea
The project aimed to establish five local community composting projects. The five community projects were:
Eco-Warriors, Bellshill: the project works with children and young people using themes of art and environment. The plan included the creation of a demonstration composting site in a high profile area in Bellshill.
Watch Us Grow, Palacerigg Country Park: Watch Us Grow is an organisation which provides training for young people with special needs and placements for people with mental health problems through the medium of gardening. It has been growing organic fruit and vegetables in its garden at Palacerigg Country Park for six years. The composting project aimed to improve and develop composting facilities and develop wormeries within its garden.
Kilsyth Community Council: the project aimed to set up a composting site on grounds adjacent to a local primary school, and to train local people as compost champions to run the site and promote its use to local residents. This project aimed to demonstrate how communities can get involved in reducing waste.
Drumpellier Cricket and Rugby Club: the project aimed to improve the composting process for the large amounts of green waste generated through grounds maintenance.
Branchelwood Estate Residents Association: covering an area of 362 households, the project aimed to build community involvement and raise awareness through the creation of 10 gardens demonstrating how different types of households could carry out composting. This project aimed to raise awareness of how individuals can get involved in reducing waste.
The key objectives
The project aimed to establish a network of composting projects in North Lanarkshire and to challenge public attitudes to composting through supporting five community organisations to set up composting facilities. The projects were diverse and aimed to demonstrate that composting is flexible and suitable for most households and community sites.
The project aimed to establish a self sustaining network of composting projects and included training for volunteers, development support for the individual projects and networking between projects to share experience and good practice.
Volunteers would be recruited and trained. Each would go on to support households to set up home composting or participate in community composting.
The project would also involve education and raising awareness through literature, school visits and demonstration days.
Project cost
The total projected cost of the project was £198,845 over a two year period. This sum included capital costs of £61,610 and revenue costs of £137,235. An additional £128,250 was identified as an in-kind contribution.
The funding package outlined in the application was:
Applicant's sources
£97,500
North Lanarkshire Council
£12,000
Sale of subsidised bins
£20,000
TWS Grant Scheme
£69,345
Total
£198,845
The projected outputs
- Five composting projects.
- Between 70 and 87 volunteers were expected to gain skills and experience.
- 30 to 45 volunteers to be trained as compost champions.
- The volunteers were expected to support approximately 1,950 households.
- 100 school groups (10 children per group) were anticipated to visit.
- 7,000 beneficiaries.
The proposed outcome of the project was the creation of a sustainable network of compost projects in North Lanarkshire.
Progress
The progress on the implementation of the community projects has been slower than anticipated due to the demise of North Lanarkshire Forward. Progress on individual community projects has also been affected by technical issues such as difficulties in securing land.
Outputs
Only one of the proposed five community projects is fully operational. The outputs to date are therefore significantly lower than anticipated.
Successes
- Engaging communities
BTCV's involvement in the development of the North Lanarkshire Community Composting Partnership has provided an opportunity for the organisation to engage with communities that they would not otherwise have connected with.
- Development of expertise and resources
The involvement in this project has built the internal capacity of BTCV - the organisation has developed experience and resources which can be used to support other communities to develop composting programmes.
Challenges
- Level of development support required by the community projects
The changes which affected North Lanarkshire Forward meant that it was unable to employ a full-time development officer to work with the five different community projects. Although North Lanarkshire Forward brought in development support for the projects on a consultancy basis, it was not possible to deliver the level of support which was required by each of the groups, especially those that did not have any staff members to drive the delivery of the composting projects.
- Keeping communities engaged
Difficulties in the delivery of projects (such as problems in securing land and changes in regulations) have made it hard to keep the community groups engaged in the process.
Learning points
The project was very ambitious - it involved five projects with five different technologies, and five groups at diverse stages of development and with differing capacity. It may have been more effective to have had a staged development process rather than to try to develop all five projects simultaneously.
Working with community groups is fluid and the speed of project development will not always match the project plan - this means that the spend profile for projects needs to be flexible to allow for group development not just project development.
Review
Future
Two of the community projects are now underway and BTCV will continue to provide support to the other groups to assist them to realise their projects.
Summary of impact
As only one of the community projects is fully operational at present, the impact of the overall project has been limited to date. However, it is anticipated that all the other community projects will be operational by Autumn 2006 so the project still has the potential to deliver many of the anticipated outcomes.
However, involvement in this project has enabled BTCV to consolidate its expertise in community composting and it now has a set of resources which are transferable.
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Communities