Following a few sheepish enquiries about late submission to our photo competition, we have decided to extend the deadline. You now have until Monday the 13th of February to send us your images of the landscape, nature, communities…of rural Scotland.
For full terms and conditions follow the link. All entries should be submitted by email to neill@cadispa.org by midnight on the 13th of February.
We have been busy developing our new website over the past few months and will be launching it very soon. However, before we do, we need new photos to illustrate what Cadispa does and reflect the communities we work with. So we’ve decided to run a photo competition.
Following on from my last post, and what I have been learning about what it is people value about their connection with Cadispa, I’d like to explore how this blog, the Cadispa facebook and other social media can strengthen the ties between communities in our, and other networks.
I joined CADISPA just as it was winding up its research into the hopes and needs of the Balmaghie region in Dumfries and Galloway. Looking through the raw data and typing up the analysis for a section of the structured survey sent out to the three communities of Balmaghie, I quickly familiarised myself with some of the issues they experienced. This meant that within five days of starting my internship I was able to head out to Balmaghie and build on the initial findings by chatting to a couple of the residents of Bridge of Dee. Doing so shed light on the complex and interrelated nature of some of these issues, and reminded me of the fun and the challenge of doing informal interviews.
Welcome to my first blog post. I have been puzzling over the best way to approach it for about month now, without much progress. But, taking inspiration from Andy and Jan, I’ve decided to explore what Cadispa has started to mean to me, over the past few months, as I’ve toured round projects in the network.
It has been fascinating and inspiring to visit so many communties and meet those responsible for some really amazing work across the country, and to begin to help communities and individuals to make real progress with projects they are planning or delivering.
When I was asked to join the Craignish Village Hall Committee in 2002 to help take forward the project to build a new hall, little did I know where it was all going to
lead!
Fund raising for the new hall was going well, but as is so often the case, village politics
meant that the community was divided between those who wanted a new hall on the site of the old one and those who wanted a new hall on a new site. I sought advice from a friend in a neighbouring community who in turn directed me to CADISPA. This proved to be a turning point, with Ruth McKain, the current CADISPA fieldworker coming out and facilitating a meeting between the two factions which resulted in a compromise acceptable to all.
For a fair while at university, I did the minimum possible to keep just abreast of
the tidal wave of deadlines. My library card lay neglected on my desk as all my
spare time was spent mountaineering. By the end of third year, however, I
realised that if I put in some hard graft, I could do well. The graft was duly
put in, I finally learnt what an e-journal was (meaning I still didn’t need to
visit the library), and my grades did indeed improve vastly. More importantly,
however, I was finally engaging with some of the big questions in Human
Geography which my lecturers were presenting to me, and I came to love rather
than just like my subject. By the time my dissertation was handed in, I was
fully converted – convinced of the capacity of social research to act as a tool
in the quest for social and environmental justice. For the first time, I had a career
aspiration – to change the world. More or less.
My own personal attachment and support for the work done by CADISPA arose because of my experience of working with Geoff Fagan and his team while I was acting as secretary to a small community enterprise which was then struggling to get established.
‘We recommend that in developing proposals for a Community empowerment and Renewal Bill the Scottish Government explores the potential of the Bill to promote:
The CADISPA Network could have written it. For twenty-five
years CADISPA has broadcast the need for communities to be placed central to
their own development: to be placed at the core of their own sustainability in
effect, to say to communities sometimes in the most difficult of geographical circumstance ‘get in there, get on and get engaged’.
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