Author: Dixon-Spain

Working on the 5 year plan for @DunansCastle today and the big news is … we can do it!

The picture that heads this post shows the 5 year cashflow for restoring the castle. I’ve been working out how the financial demands for the work on the project can be catered for utilising a mix of income from Scottishlaird, grant-funding and finance. The figures show it is possible at present levels, but it would be much more comfortable if the ScottishLaird project kept expanding at its current rate (of course!).

The reason we’re looking at this now is that we will soon know whether the bridge restoration project, led by the Dunans Charitable Trust, will get funding – this is effectively the ‘go’ button for the entire site and will lock us into a five year process that will mean we’ll open the building for visitors sometime early in 2019.

Obviously there are some critical stop/go moments. The grant-funding is one, listed building consent is another, loan finance yet another, but if there is anything I have learned from working with CGDT over the years, is that any project, large or small, is unstoppable once it gets momentum.

So now that the cashflow is roughed out, the next step is to put together plans for how the ScottishLaird project will maintain its momentum, continuing to sell decorative titles and also all the other products which will help to restore out Highland Castle. We’re looking at mugs, calendars, garments and more books (of course), but more excitingly (for techheads like me) we’re considering a game for smartphones – considering only at the moment, but given the revenues generated in the casual gaming market at present, this could represent a huge opportunity.

All I am wondering now is, what type of game should it be? A Castle restoration sim perhaps? Or maybe that’s too close to the bone?

But first the 5 year plan – and here’s the gant chart it’ll be based on!

draft-timeline

Medallists All: Great afternoon watching Kilmodan’s Sports Day

Everyone won medals. Deserved ’em. Good stuff Mrs Hawkins & Co. The highlight was the team pursuit around the shinty pitch (pictured below)!

14sportsday-pursuit

Insightful Seminar on Achieving Impact with Community Benefit in Argyll & Bute from Foundation Scotland

Foundation Scotland held the third of their regional seminars on achieving impact with funds derived from wind farms in Kilmory Castle today, and as chair of CGDT I was privileged to be asked to make a presentation on how Community Benefit was managed in our community.

The whole event was extremely well facilitated by James Hilder, who provided a logical, fair and humorous context for the various presentations and discussions on the day. I’d had misgivings about spending another day away from work, but in this case I took away several highly valuable insights about the disbursement of Community Benefit and also, of course, on Community Development.

The first came from James himself with regard to maintaining community support for development organisations – he recommended a social audit whereby the organisation commissions an independent study on what affect it has had on the community – how far it has travelled towards achieving its objectives.

Another was the centrality of a community development or action plan in capturing a community’s aspirations over time – that this has to be a living document, and should be revised constantly. Not only that, but that Windfarm Trusts ought to re-examine their funding criterias regularly to ensure they align with the community action plan. Yes, these are obvious points, but sometimes in the mix of projects and endeavour, it is easy to miss out on the essential, foundation tasks.

Further, that there are grant-giving wind farm trusts which make their decisions in open session, rather than behind closed doors. This for me is the ultimate in transparency and I can see how this might usefully counteract accusations of cronyism in small, isolated communities.

And lastly, that the issues current here (like woeful broadband, reducing school rolls, ageing population and decreasing housing stock) are current everywhere, sometimes writ even larger – for example West Kintyre is even longer and more etiolated than ColGlen – and they get less money in total from four wind farms than our community for one.

 

I’ve included my notes from the presentation below – somewhat different from the SPREEE presentation at Holyrood in March given the context, but essentially the same story.

And apparently there’ll be a film later as well as the full presentation online. I’ll link to it when its published.

Continue reading Insightful Seminar on Achieving Impact with Community Benefit in Argyll & Bute from Foundation Scotland

A Cultural Assembly for Argyll: the Case for taking Ourselves Seriously

As proprietor of Dunans Castle and also as a director of The Walking Theatre Company, not to mentioned being publisher of ForArgyll.com, on Wednesday [18th June 2014] I spent an interesting few hours in the company of assorted artists, creators, curators, social entrepreneurs, producers and third sector professionals, all wanting to progress the idea of a cultural assembly for the Creative sector. Continue reading A Cultural Assembly for Argyll: the Case for taking Ourselves Seriously

New Interpretation for Dunans Bridge installed on a truly glorious Argyll Tuesday!

A beautiful day on which to install our new signage (spot the lectern in the top image). Took some more photos of the grounds (and of course Barty!).

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The effect of Scottish Independence on England: @DeborahOrr nails it!

Scottish independence would change England more than Scotland

Had to share this article in Saturday’s Guardian, which was in turn inspired by J. K. Rowling’s recent donation to the Better Together campaign. A really interesting take on what is going on – and right in line with Angus Reid’s Modest Proposal which speaks to, in my mind anyway, the UK’s present democratic deficit.

A Modest Proposal
from the poem, Call for a Constitution

if I as a writer of poetry
were called upon to give a form of words
to model the nation’s behaviour
it would be this: ownership obliges
everyone to respect and to care for
the sacred; to respect and to care for
freedom of conscience; and to recognise
the gift of every individual
to respect it, care for it, nourish it;
to respect and to care for communities;
and to care for the land, and wherever
the land has been abused to restore it
so that it can support all forms of life:
five principles, five fingers on the hand.

NB. Just realised appropos the above, today’s the day when the Scottish Gov’t published its consultation on a constitution. Not as poetic, but I really liked the idea of popular sovereignty – we’re all our own rulers. Heady stuff – a lot to be admired, a lot to be discussed …

We have lectern! New signage at the castle for the multitudes of Lairds and Ladies this summer!

castle-sign-lecternThe first of our new signs is now in place. Its a kind of lectern made out of treated softwood, so its neither too heavy to shift, or too light to run away with. We also wanted something we could swap signs in and out of as the project progressed. I think Mike has done us proud realising the design.

Later this week we’ll post photos of the new Bridge sign.

Here’s the original design post btw.

Delighted to announce our first reprint of Conservation Plan for Dunans today!

Very happy to announce that the sales of our Conservation Plan, both online and onsite at Dunans have been so good we have had to order a reprint of the book. Great situation to be in, and delighted that the investment in the design and print time has been worth it. This is also a testament both to the readability of Robin Kent’s report, and the interest that our Lairds and Ladies have shown in the project.

We’re anticipating high sales going into Christmas, so there’s likely to be a second reprint in September.

And here’s a question – what is the subtle difference between original print-run and this reprint? Answers in the comments please!

Hint: the photo is a clue!

The Design for the new Flag for the @DunansCastle Project is finalised!

dunanssaltireWe have recently had some requests for a Dunans Castle Project flag, one that all the Lairds and Ladies can get hold of and fly if and as they so desire. Well, today I am delighted to say, we have finalised our design and the order for the prototype has been made. Once we’ve received the flag we’ll check the colour reproduction, and adjust the final pantones accordingly.

All we need now is a flag pole!

 

@TWTC website design refreshed with visually edgier theme, giving better access to all of the TWTC content

twtc-newFor the last couple of years the TWTC website has been using a theme from Pagelines which has served us well. However, we started to hit its limits when the number of pages on the website exceed the menu functionalities capacity (128 pages, I think!). So it was back to the drawing board, or rather back to adapting one of WP’s venerable themes. Twenty Twelve lent itself readily and along with a sliding image plugin and some nifty CSS work, the website now looks spiffing and works properly…

… well mostly, Firefox, is good, but the webkit browsers Safari and Chrome are not rendering the sliding images at the correct width. I’ll be working on this over the next few days so check back then (those of you with webkit browsers that is!)

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