A space to call their own 

Back in 1998 Gail Cunningham was just one of six mums in her home village on the Isle of Lewis bemoaning the lack of a local playpark to take her two small children to. Now, thanks to their hard work and some tireless fundraising, the area not only has its playpark, but the Eoropie Dunes park they’ve helped create — built on land which was once common grazing land and being used as a dump — has become one of the area’s major tourist attractions and is a focal point for the whole community.

“We wanted the park to be in keeping with the surrounding area, not a jumble of brightly-coloured metal, so all the equipment is timber, and as we’ve added to the project with a nature trail, playhouse and so on, we’ve tried to bring in local artists and craftspeople to work on it so that everyone feels involved,” Gail explains.

An initial Lottery grant of £104,000 back in 2002 allowed the first phases to take place, “and after that other smaller amounts of money came in, as many organisations will only give their money towards a project when they can see you’re actually going to have enough to do what you say you will!”

Despite a few setbacks — “the first lot of play equipment wasn’t sunk deep enough and was already listing at 45 degrees before the Health and Safety report was done!” — the playpark opened in summer 2002, and spurred Gail and the committee on to greater heights. Over the years they’ve added everything from a skateboard park to wigwams, and attracted further Lottery grants of £18,000 and £40,000 to provide heritage features. They now fund a whole range of physical activities for young people in the area. “We wanted the park to have something for everyone, since it’s taken the whole community to really make this project what it is — a magical and beautiful site,” says Gail.

The transformation is so impressive the park earned a place in this year’s National Lottery Awards final, narrowly missing out in its category to the National Botanic Garden of Wales. But for Gail the chance to rub shoulders at the awards do with TV stars came second place itself to meeting other volunteers for whom Lottery funding has changed their whole lives. “When you set out on a project like this you don’t know where to start and who to go to for money and learning can be very hard work. What I’d really like now is to be able to help other people achieve the sort of success we have and show them just how much is possible,” she says.

Memories on screen

As a child, Ricky Wood (right) was fascinated by the stories told to him by his grandmother, Josie, (below, with husband Robert) about her amazing life. She was arrested by the Nazis in 1943 and spent two years in a concentration camp at Dachau before being liberated by the U.S. army and escaping back to her home in Italy. Finally, she ended up in Scotland after marrying a soldier from Aberdeenshire. By the time she died three years ago, Ricky, now 33, was working with his father and brother in their own film company in Aberdeen making corporate training films for oil companies, but he was determined to put his skills to good use by making a film inspired by her life and experiences.

“So many people my age know so little about the horror of the concentration camps and yet it’s recent history — some of the survivors, and even some staff who ran the camps, are still alive today,” explains Ricky. After touring Auschwitz with his family they came up with the idea for Forgotten Souls, a short film about a Holocaust survivor who escaped to Scotland to forget his past. But when the idea was overlooked by the BBC’s Tartan Shorts project, Ricky’s family set about funding the film themselves.

“In the end the film took around 10 months to make, shooting at weekends. We bought costumes from eBay, had replica uniforms made and hired the rest. The only professional actor was the main character, who worked free of charge, and the rest were friends and family who worked as extras. In all we spent £10,000 of our own money, mostly on costumes and covering the cost of meals and transport for everyone while we worked,” says Ricky.

The end result was a moving, 24-minute film that so impressed a member of Scottish Screen, Scotland’s development agency for film making, that she encouraged the Woods to submit it to a number of film festivals. One was the world-renowned festival at Cannes earlier this year — not a venue that comes cheap. But although traditional Arts funding wasn’t available, the Lottery fund came up with £1500 — enough to send the team to Cannes to showcase the film, which went on to attract invitations to further festivals in Los Angeles, and New York, where it won an ‘Achievement In Film Making’ Award.

“After investing so much of our own money it was a real confidence boost to have the Lottery show its support for the project, and getting to Cannes allowed us to set up meetings with distributors and really generate some publicity for the film,” says Ricky, who now has more film project ideas in the pipeline. “It was wonderful to meet with professionals in the film industry and have them be so encouraging.”

Leading a merry dance

Cerebral palsy meant that Janette Burns’ daughter Marion (now 23) had always had limited capabilities and mobility, but at her special school as a girl she’d loved being part of a wheelchair dance team and had won medals. Sadly, once she left school there were no teams for her to join near their home in Kilbarchan, Renfrewshire — so in 2005 Janette decided to go ahead and start her own.

“Marion did a fun run in her wheelchair to raise funds and we managed to get a donation of £500 from a charitable trust to start us off,” Janette explains, “but with hall hire to pay and fees to join the Wheelchair Dance Association we never had much money left in the kitty.”

Nonetheless the group quickly took off and a regular team of dancers met to practise routines choreographed by Janette, determined to get there even when the practical problems of finding carers with transport facilities threatened to dampen their enthusiasm.

The ultimate dream was to enter the group — now called the Wallace Co Wheelchair Dance team after the hall in which they practised — in the National Wheelchair Dance Festival in November 2006, but when she worked out the cost of transporting the team and their carers to Blackpool where the festival was to be held, as well as funding costumes and accommodation, Janette knew no amount of raffles was going to raise the money she needed in time, and she turned to the Lottery fund instead.

With the resulting grant of £3500 the team not only made it to the competition but waltzed away with bronze and silver medals. But just as importantly, as far as Janette is concerned, is the huge boost it gave to every member. “Because of their disabilities they’re often socially isolated and dependent on other people for so much, but this is one thing they do all on their own and the achievement is all theirs. It fulfils a real social need for them, and gives them a chance to dress up and express themselves. Because of their success at Blackpool we got a lot of publicity and they absolutely loved having people recognise and congratulate them — they’ve now collected quite a team of supporters and friends.”

Not only that, but the portfolio of pictures Janette has put together of the team in action, along with their success story so far — they reached the semi final of the National Lottery Awards — means she has high hopes of securing other grants in future to take them to other competitions.

“They know they belong to something that has done well, and that’s something money can’t buy,” smiles Janette.

Digging for victory

The parents of children at Witton-le-Wear primary school near Bishop Auckland in Durham might find themselves being asked to dig deep this year to help out — but this time, not into their pockets. The school, which is at the heart of the small rural community and has just 86 pupils, heard last year that it had secured a whopping £9800 grant from the National Lottery’s ‘Breathing Spaces’ project to develop a waste area of land in the school grounds into a garden planned out by the children.

“We costed out what we’d like to spend and put in our bid, never expecting to get everything we asked for,” admits headteacher Mark Stephenson. “I’d warned the children we might only get a fraction of it, but that it wouldn’t matter because when we first came up with the idea of building the garden we thought we’d have to raise all the money ourselves from school funds anyway and just make the garden a little bit at a time. When I announced to the school in a special assembly that we’d been granted every penny the children could hardly believe how lucky we’d been — it was certainly a day of celebration.”

The whole school had worked together to design the garden with dedicated assemblies and school councils to bring everyone’s ideas together. The colourful plans include a wildlife area to encourage insects and minibeasts for science study, a vegetable patch so the children can grow (and then cook) their own organic produce, a sensory garden of flowers, and even a patio area laid out for giant chess. Now it’s all hands to the pump to make it happen, as a condition of Lottery grants is that the money be used within 12 months.

“The local allotment association has already pledged to help,” adds Mark, “and I’ve persuaded a property developer working behind the school grounds to come in with the diggers to lay the foundations and even lend us their ‘bat lady’, who advises on protecting wildlife, to come into school for a talk. It’s brought the whole community together with the school, which is wonderful for the children. And I expect when I roll my sleeves up to help they’ll make sure they save the dirtiest jobs for me!”

For more information about applying for a grant from the National Lottery go to www.lotterygoodcauses.org.uk