Broader range of Newry community groups to recieve funding

Councillor Liz Kimmins has confirmed that a broader range of community groups will receive funding for revenue projects including summer schemes, major and minor festivals, community engagement, tourism and arts and culture.

It follows a proposal made by Sinn Fein to defer the decision back to the Active and Healthy Communities Committee at the full council meeting on 9 April 2018.

The Sinn Féin Councillor explained, “Due to the high volume of applications, the council did not have enough money within the current Active and Healthy Communities budget to fund all the successful applicants, and if Council were to provide 100% funding to successful applicants, in rank order of their score, 172 groups would have received no funding.

“This would essentially mean that many community and voluntary groups would be unable to deliver their proposed projects and for many areas, this would be detrimental to the local community.”

She continued, “At the Active and Healthy Communities meeting in April I asked for this to be revisited and following this request, all successful groups (334) will now be awarded 50% of their requested amount, meaning that an additional 172 groups will receive funding for their projects.

“We had asked council officers to look for savings in other Council departments and at the full council meeting on 8 May a report was presented where the additional funding had been found and we have agreed for this to be reprofiled to fund those outstanding groups financial assistance.”

The Newry City Councillor added, “Sinn Fein recognise the huge contribution the community and voluntary sector make to the enrichment of the communities throughout this district, and that many of these groups are dependent on small amounts of funding to deliver community festivals, summer schemes.

“It was our desire to ensure that there was equality of opportunity for all groups who had submitted successful applications and we are happy that this has happened.”

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Posted by Newry Times News on May 16 2018. Filed under Community. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry