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We’re thrilled to announce that National Lottery Awards for All has agreed to fund our new North Angus Transport Connections project!

After working in North Angus for several years, most recently in the area around Brechin and Edzell with our Rural Wisdom project, and the follow-on, Community Connections, we kept hearing that people living in North Angus find that poor transport is a major problem for them, with both poor public transport and very little community transport. You can find out more about the work we’ve done in this area in this blog post.

Here’s what we heard at one workshop:

 

Because of all this, we wanted to create a short project working with people in Brechin, Edzell, Kirriemuir and the surrounding area to explore possible solutions to the problems and:

  • find out more about the sorts of problems people have and the types of community transport that could meet their needs;
  • talk to other people in Angus, especially in neighbouring areas, and find out what they think the solutions are and build partnerships for an Angus-wide, or North Angus-wide, future community transport scheme;
  • find out what other people are doing in other places, and their experience of what works, what the challenges are, how to get started and make it sustainable;
  • go to events such as the annual Scottish Rural Transport conference and find out more about other approaches.

The people taking part are members of a working group in Brechin and those from other community groups across the area, who came together after there were problems during winter 2018-19 and who have been working together since then to find a solution.

The project will include:

  • checking out with other people in the area on their experiences and ideas and what would work for them;
  • feeding back to people in the local area on what the Finding Out project does and on what we find;
  • inviting people from other community groups and interested individuals to take part in the project.

People from the local community are involved throughout the project and have planned arrangements to make it inclusive including:

  • having sessions to gather people’s ideas at places that young people, families and people in other circumstances already go to, as well as places that work for older people;
  • ensuring that it reaches people who are at risk of being socially isolated and those in equalities groups;
  • providing expenses for participants to make sure that cost is not a barrier to anyone going on fact-finding visits;
  • making sure updates from the project that are accessible and easy to understand, to keep the community involved.

We’ll be posting more as this exciting project progresses!