Grants Awarded
2023 Grant Recipients
Information about all successful grant applicants will be posted here, once formalities are finalised with each of them.
Lauren Savage has been running Little Yogi Bears since June 2021. She offers yoga and sensory activities for infants, toddlers and their mums and dads, with 7 classes happening each week at Forres House Community Centre. Lauren is also planning to offer yoga classes to young primary age children. A key aim of her classes is to provide parents with a place to meet other parents, and social time is built into the end of each class. With NLT’s grant Lauren will be able to expand her collection of sensory toys and equipment, purchase padded yoga mats and more percussion instruments for the toddlers class. The grant will also assist Lauren to obtain the next level of training needed to enable her to teach yoga to young primary age children.
Fiona Reilly is a birth and postnatal Doula, teacher of baby classes, maternity reflexologist and therapist, who runs Positive Pregnancy Walks once a month in Findhorn and Forres. The walks are an opportunity for pregnant women and their partners to come together and meet other pregnant women and develop friendships. The free walks encourage community and connection, helping people feel less alone. They are also an opportunity for people to share experiences and ask questions, and for Fiona to share evidence-based information when called for. Families return after their babies are born to share their experiences, introduce their babies and inspire others.
Forres Osprey Bus provides transport services to groups within the Forres Academy catchment area. Osprey Bus’s main focus is to enable people who experience disadvantage through age, disability, ill-health, financial or other hardship to be able to take part in various activities. The NLT grant will provide core costs for an Administrative Assistant for 2024, a contribution towards the annual maintenance costs and insurance for Osprey Bus vehicles and a contribution towards signage on Osprey Bus’s new electric bus.
ReBOOT will support the provision of free refurbished devices (full computer systems or laptops) to disadvantaged people in the Forres area, in order to facilitate their access to training, employment opportunities and other services.
Users of the ReBOOT service will be identified through referrals from Moray Council Employability, the Department of Work and Pensions, FACT, SAFFA and other such constituted groups or government bodies. The Grant will contribute to the core costs for managerial and technical staff for a period of 6 months and cover the cost of second-hand devices for refurbishment.
Founded in 2010, Naturally Useful (NU), makes and sells traditionally crafted products, including woven willow baskets and coffins, felted wool products and naturally dyed textiles, using home-grown or locally-sourced natural materials. NU’s training programmes include day courses in a range of crafts, including basket weaving, felting and natural dyeing in various community venues, and longer courses including cultivating willow and dye plants at its base in Rafford, with staff, trainees and volunteers teaching, learning, and growing together.
NU is expanding its training programmes and facilities in order to be able to offer a Health & Wellbeing project to provide supported creative learning opportunities to people with additional needs. The programmes will be aimed at people who respond well to bespoke craft-based courses with NU’s skilled and experienced tutors.
The NLT grant funding will enable the employment of a Project Co-ordinator and two Project Workers to lead Health and Wellbeing workshops and courses for people with additional needs to make tactile, functional items from willow and wool. Service Providers such as community-based Social Care providers, the Job Centre and Mental Health providers will refer participants to NU. Part of the NLT grant will also cover equipment and tools to be used in the Wellbeing workshops and courses.
Film Forres is a thriving, community-based cinema for all ages, which screens films in Forres Town Hall, as well as at various ‘pop up’ venues in the Forres area. Throughout the year, Forres Film offers a quality programme and cinematic experiences, such as Film Forres Family events, Film Forres Presents and Film Forres Mobile, always endeavouring to keep costs affordable. Film Forres has collaborated with and continues to offer its services to community groups and local businesses to create innovative events, as opposed to simply hosting a film. A key objective is to offer a safe and friendly opportunity for people to come together through the medium of film.
The NLT Grant will provide funding for the role of Coordinator/Development Manager for 24 months from January 2024 – Dec 2025. Film Forres’ current events coordinator has been in the role since October 2021 and Film Forres is delighted for this to continue, due to the enormous benefits that this has brought to the success of the venture.
For 20 years, Wild Things has been delivering a wide range of educational, wellbeing and conservation services to communities across Moray, working with all ages and abilities. In total, around 1,300 people participated in Wild Things courses over the last year, around 300 of them from the Forres area.
Specialised in working with neuro-diverse participants as well as those with other physical, social, emotional and behavioural needs, the Wild Things team consists of dedicated outdoor educators who are passionate and highly knowledgeable about Scottish flora and fauna and who utilise one of Scotland’s most valuable educational assets – its landscapes and wildlife, to create varied, inspiring and transformative impacts for a wide range of people.
Wild Things provides qualifications and experiential learning, through a rich mixture of environmental-sciences, conservation, wellbeing focused and skill-based activities. In addition to this, since 2015, Wild Things has been a registered and accredited training centre, developing and delivering custom Level 1-3 qualifications, designed to empower both young people and registered teachers with various outdoor skills and knowledge.
By covering the cost for one year of core staff time to be dedicated to developing and expanding the above course offerings, the NLT grant funding will enable Wild Things to scale-up the delivery, variety and, ultimately, the revenue generated by its accredited training courses and other income-generating services.
SwimABLE provides a combination of pool-based surf and swim activities to over 72 children with additional support needs in the Forres area alone. Referrals are managed through the Active Schools Moray Forres Co-ordinator, with children referred by schools, or parents/carers where home-schooled. Termly reports detail progress and development. The ripple effect from these sessions have already provided many positive impacts, reported on a continuous basis by teachers, staff, parents/carers, where listening, social and communication skills have improved both at school and at home.
NLT funding will allow SwimABLE the flexibility to train volunteers and coaches in swim teaching awards and deliver continual professional development modules at home in Forres. SwimABLE also plan to host a second Gala in the 2023-24 academic year, which will provide young swimmers looking for a more competitive edge, a date to look forward to and provide focus to lessons and training in the run up to the event.
Forres Bluefins is an amateur swimming club with 60 members ranging from 7 – 14 years. The main aim of the club is to allow young swimmers to develop their swimming skills, which enhances their physical and mental wellbeing. It offers them an option to compete at a local level, focusing on safety, welfare and inclusivity while being accountable and holding the highest standards, as expected by Scottish Swimming.
The grant will enable Forres Bluefins to buy a club-dedicated waterproof tablet, in order to video swimmers underwater, so that the coaches can help them improve their technique. The grant will also fund the purchase of upgraded hy-tek swim software, which is required to input the swimmers’ times and register them for swim meets. It also records swimmers’ times when the club host their own meet. This tech upgrade will benefit young people in the area, as it will allow the club to offer the best training to young swimmers and to continue to run successfully, by maintaining a high standard of training and support.
Growing2gether Nursery Mentoring Programme targets two sets of vulnerable children – disengaged teenagers and children at nursery (4-6 years) with additional support needs. For half a day a week over 18 weeks, Growing2gether staff (trained in positive psychology) take a group of teenagers into a local primary/nursery school. Each teenager becomes a mentor and role model to a specific child in the primary or nursery school. Whilst on the programme, the young people have the opportunity to earn a Level 4 SCVQ in Personal Development (2 Units – self in community and self-awareness).
The charity’s second programme, known as Growing2gether Youth Social Action, is an innovative, youth-led programme, which provides young people with the opportunity to work together as a creative team, to assess the needs of their community, identify an issue that they care deeply about and to design and deliver a project that will address this issue. It builds the confidence, emotional health, employment and life skills of young people who have otherwise disengaged from education, helping them to reach their full potential.
In order to get these valuable and innovative programmes established in Moray schools as soon as possible, Newbold Legacy Trust is funding the first ever Growing2gether project in Moray, which started with a Nursery Mentoring Programme at Elgin Academy in September 2023, to be followed by two Nursery Mentoring Programmes in 2024-2025 at Forres Academy. Funding from NLT will also support Growing2gether to run a Growing2gether Youth Social Action project in September 2024 for Forres Academy pupils who have completed the Growing2gether Nursery Mentoring Programme.
Growing2gether also aims to train teachers and youth workers in the schools to be able to facilitate future programmes, thus enabling schools to become self-sufficent by running the programmes themselves with quality assurance/outcome evaluation provided by the charity.
Rafford Scottish Women’s Institute has been awarded a small grant to help cover some of the underlying costs of running meetings for the next two years. This will provide time for the group to re-establish itself after the pandemic, with the aim of increasing membership to pre-Covid numbers and beyond.
Based in The Park Ecovillage, Findhorn, Dance North Scotland is a Creative Scotland Regularly Funded Organisation, which exists to create space for transformational contemporary dance; engaging with people from across the globe to just down the road. Dance North does this by-Supporting artists and their practice-Inspiring audiences and participants-Presenting work-Empowering through creativity-Treating people fairly-Working in partnership
A key strand of Dance North’s work is its participation programme, which empowers people through dance, enhancing health and wellbeing through the joy of movement. Dance North Scotland gratefully acknowledges the support of Newbold Legacy Trust for its new programme of Dance for Parkinson’s classes in Forres, starting from April 2024.
Part of the Dance for Parkinson’s Scotland network, these classes are designed especially for people living with Parkinson’s, their carers and families. Each class in a fun, creative environment, with a live musical accompaniment. Research has shown dance classes to be enormously beneficial to people living with Parkinson’s, bringing substantial quality of life improvements, especially inflexibility, gait and balance. The classes are open to all, with no experience required, and offer exercise and community in a warm and welcoming setting–participants are even encouraged to share their hobbies and interests so that these can be incorporated into the movement.
