For inspiration, take a look at the example of Green Valley Grocers

Your help is needed to make this a reality, please do come along to offer your support.

Change of venue for Tonight:
Incredibly Edible Dunbar and & District will meet at the HUB shop on the High Street (beside the Town House and John Muir statue).
If you interested in making it easier for folk to eat locally grown food – come on out.

Local Food Findings Ward 7
See what others are doing: http://www.incredible-edible-todmorden.co.uk/

Day 1 will be in the Parish Halls, Glasgow and Day 2 at the Victoria Halls, Dunblane (next to the train station).

Day 2 (19th June) is about sustainable gardening and sessions will be chaired by MSPs Jim Tolson and Shirley-Anne Somerville. Topics will include fruit trees on allotments, bumblebees, beekeeping, wine-making and growing prize vegetables. There will be stroll to Dunblane Allotments, and the day will be rounded off with a get together in a local hostelry. Although the conference is free (apart from a donation for lunch) registration is necessary.

The five Dragons representing Community Windpower Ltd (BeGreen’s funders), British Energy, Lafarge, Sustaining Dunbar and Dunbar Grammar School were blown away by the quality of the presentations. Nigel Blair manager of Lafarge said “The students have shown great enthusiasm for the competition and the standard of the pitches to the Dragon’s was excellent. It was very difficult to make a decision and all of the students should be very proud of the work that they have completed”.

Project funding totalling £12,500 was split between three projects. £5,000 went to the Lauderdale team which will enable them to deliver their starter packs through the grammar and primary schools and £7,500 will be shared by the Cromwell and Castle teams who share similar project ideas. Both teams will  work together to develop their community farm / allotment project at the school .Winterfield and Victoria teams each won fifty house points for best presentation and best researched projects respectively. A further £2,500 will be used as prize monies for the winning teams.

“Philip Revell of Sustaining Dunbar was similarly impressed with the students’ enthusiasm, the quality of the pitches and their ability to think on their feet to answer questions and stated that “Sustaining Dunbar will look forward to assisting the winning teams to work up their project plans and make them a reality”.

Head teacher of Dunbar Grammar School Paul Raffaelli announced “I was immensely proud of my pupils and felt that I could ask the teams anything about their projects as did the other Dragons.  This made the experience very real for me and the young people.  This was a very good example of the ‘Curriculum for Excellence’ in action”.

Ray Ball, Finance Director of Community Windpower Ltd echoed Mr Raffaelli’s comments. “I was extremely impressed by the pupils.  They were all very confident in their respective projects and the quality of the presentations and detail provided made the Dragon’s job of choosing the best scheme extremely difficult.  There are some budding entrepreneurs within Dunbar Grammar School. It was a pleasure to be involved.  Good luck to the teams with their project delivery .It would be good to come back in the future to see how the projects worked”.

Paul Winkle, Station Director at Torness Power Station said: “The competition was a fantastic opportunity to teach young children how different forms of energy are sourced and generated, and it encourages them to look at the environment in which they live, in a different way.   The children were extremely enthusiastic and I hope they can encourage the community reduce its carbon footprint. I am delighted to have been part of the competition.”

Have your say about the past, present and future!

Have your say regarding:
Energy Efficiency Survey
Local Food Survey
These survey forms coming soon…
Local Water; Local Transportation; Local Enterprise and Employment; Local Education; and, Local Health.

Have your say about the past, present and future!

The 2025 M.A.P Project team are making maps to record the past, the present and your ideas about the future regarding access to local food, public transport and paths, local employment, home energy efficiency etc.  So far 600+ local people through out ward 7 have shared and mapped their knowledge and ideas. The summary reports are available on this website by area.

Examples of our mapping projects: Food Mapping

We did a drop in food mapping event in an unused shop on the High Street over two weeks leading up to the local food gathering. At the drop in people could map their knowledge about where we got our food in the past (i.e through the Dig for Victory years), where they get their food now and where they would like to get their food in the future. We used a separate map for each topic (past, present, future). We used post-it notes to enable people to record and map their knowledge and ideas.

We also used an H-Form which is a tool designed to enable people to self evaluate “How much of the food you eat is locally produced?”. With this tool they could give themselves a score between 0 (no local food eaten) and 10 (all food eaten is local). More important than these scores are people’s reasons for their scores which they record themselves onto post-its. We asked them to also record their ideas for making it easier for them to access locally produced/ grown food and to map where (onto the future maps).

We also mapped local knowledge and ideas regarding Public Transport, Paths, Local employment, home energy efficiency and skills

Because we know that only a small proportion of the population dropped into the Map Hub (we tracked by age and gender and area) or come to meetings – we recruited local people from each of the settlement areas in our Ward and trained them in Community Mapping techniques to carry out a wide spread survey (as above but getting out to where people live/ work/ schools etc). 20+ local facilitators where trained by me in mapping and h-forms and they where paid to carry out the survey work in and around where they live.

At this point 600+ people of all ages and areas have had their say.

We are now looking to study the 1940s Farm Survey Maps at the National Archives to map more about the past. We are also getting out and about doing farm visits and mapping past, present and future. We will be interviewing more local key elderly people to continue to map details about the past.

Once we have consolidated all the map survey outputs then we will continue to publish them on the website. You can find summary reports for all areas now e.g. http://www.sustainingdunbar.org/2010/03/26/dunbar-central-2025-m-a-p-project/ If you go under categories you will be able to see all reports by area as they are done.

If you are interested in  training in Community Mapping and Action Planning and we could come your way to train up local people to do as we are doing. Call Susan Guy to discuss 01368 866 920.

We will be showing a number of short films looking at the past, present and future of food growing.

All welcome, especially if you bring some home baking to share!

We currently have 26 volunteer facilitators knocking on doors around the Dunbar and East Linton area, carrying out a survey regarding local: food, energy, transport and employment -potentially interviewing up to 1000 local people. You are invited to their report back session at 3pm on Thursday 28th January at Hallhill HealthyLiving Centre. All Welcome.

We will be holding further report back sessions as part of a series of ‘2025 roadshows’ around the area in the coming weeks -watch this space.