A regal start to second year of funding for community spaces

What would you do if you ever had the honour of meeting royalty? Better still, what would you do if a member of the royal family were to pay you a visit to see the fruits of your labour, a project that your community had put its very heart and soul into?

The Ventnor Botanic Garden Friends’ Society, in the Isle of Wight, were lucky (or unlucky, depending on how you look at it!) enough to find out exactly how it feels as they recently prepared for a visit from His Royal Highness, The Prince of Wales and The Duchess of Cornwall.

Simon Goodenough of the Friends’ Society explained to me, “Once the royal household confirmed a date for the visit, there was a great buzz of excitement – then reality set in and it dawned on us how much there was to prepare for!”

The Friends’ Society were granted just under £50,000 from Groundwork UK’s Community Spaces programme to create the Westgate project. The project used funding to cultivate an area of neglected garden space, improve access with new pathways and stimulate the senses with a new sensory garden and botanic plants.

With bated breath, the group welcomed visitors from near and far, who came to celebrate the opening of the new gardens at Ventnor Botanic Garden and to see the royal couple.

A mass of smiling Union Jack toting schoolchildren greeted them as they made their entrance to the garden. Celebrity gardener Alan Titchmarsh joined Prince Charles and the Duchess in a tour of the garden, and a meet and greet with the local dignitaries.  Amid much fanfare, Prince Charles then unveiled the Westgate Garden that the community had worked so hard on – and even though the heavens opened it didn’t dampen anyone’s spirits.

The new garden really is fit for a king, as the group have spent the past 12 months planning and developing it in fine detail – from the landscape design to sourcing exotic plants from the High Andes and South Africa.  With (the aptly named) Royal Palms from Arizona and cacti from Peru and Chile thriving in the Great British weather, the garden is now a sight to behold and is a peaceful and relaxing space that will also double up as a valuable teaching resource for schools.

This garden typifies what the Community Spaces programme is all about – people with a common interest joining forces to create better local environments for themselves and others to enjoy.

The programme, funded by the Big Lottery Fund, provides grants of between £10,000 and £50,000 to community groups to give them the chance to take charge of their neighbourhoods and make improvements to public open spaces. To make sure these improvements stand the test of time we’ve included a sustainability grant, so groups delivering small and medium projects can have up to £3,500 of additional funding to spend on tools, equipment, taster sessions or training to help them maintain their project.

There are now 20 Community Spaces projects that have launched, from play areas to ponds, skate parks to pocket parks and allotments to activity zones. In the first year of Community Spaces, Groundwork has allocated over £3 million, split between 90 community groups in every region of the country, each at different stages in their delivery.

Once a project has been approved at Stage 1, we allocate a trained Facilitator that is based in the same region as the group, who works with the group to help them develop their project idea and put together their Stage 2 application.

When we evaluated the first year of the programme it was encouraging to hear that groups found help from the Facilitators invaluable and they also found that Groundwork were helpful and quick to respond to enquiries. We’re obviously pleased that community groups think we’re providing a good service! Overall the evaluation was very positive, and while there are lessons to be learned this will help us to improve our programme, and in turn, help community groups deliver quality projects more effectively.

It’s great to see that some groups are blogging about the work they’re doing on their projects, and are joining the Community Spaces Fund group on the photo-sharing site, Flickr. We hope that by encouraging social networking, more community groups will be inspired and want to apply to the programme.

I’m really looking forward to what promises to be an even more eventful second year of Community Spaces. The Westgate project launch at Ventnor Botanic Garden marked a great – and very regal – start to another year of Community Spaces projects. Follow us on our journey via our blogging site

For more information, please see the Community Spaces website.