On the Way to Mainstreaming - Gorbals Ideas Fund
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The Gorbals Ideas Fund is a community-led Participatory Budgeting (PB) initiative based in the Gorbals area of Glasgow. Facilitated and supported by New Gorbals Housing Association, we’ve been working to promote and embed participatory budgeting across the area since April 2018.
Since we started we’ve been doing this in a way that seems quite common across Scotland - small grants and community voting events and we’ve been pretty successful. 900 local people have voted to support 51 ideas and initiatives from 32 unique projects and people. As Panel members we’ve had opportunities to engage in workshops, learning sessions and conferences that have pushed our understanding of PB and our ambition to unlock its full potential for the Gorbals.
As 2019 came to a close we got good news, two grants that New Gorbals Housing Association applied for to sustain our work were successful. A Community Lottery Grant secures our facilitation support for the next 3 years and a Scottish Government Investing in Communities Fund provides a participatory budgeting ‘pot’.
Securing this funding has given us space to think about what we want the Gorbals Ideas Fund to achieve in the next few years. Over two development sessions, facilitated by David Reilly at SCDC, we developed a vision:
Gorbals Ideas Fund Community Panel
“The Gorbals Ideas Fund creates opportunities for local people to influence the funding and budget decisions that impact on our lives and our communities.”
We’ve begun to explore this vision in greater detail, thinking about why we want to achieve this and what we’ll need to do to get there. It’s clearly a development, it expands on the small grant processes we’ve been delivering and will mean a shift in our role as Panel members as we work with local people to find ways to shape and influence what happens in the community at every level of decision making.
It’s ambitious but no one ever got anywhere by standing still, so we’re happy to be taking our first steps towards mainstreaming!
Gorbals Ideas Fund Community Panel
Scott Chase, Melissa Gillen, Joyce Templeton, Trisha Ingram and Heather McArthur & Jo Speirs
