Positive Carrickfergus are on a mission to share positive stories about Carrickfergus and promote community -led regeneration.
As our newest member we caught up with Director, Lee Robb to find out more about their work and what motivated them join NICVA.
What is your goal?
Our goal is to make Carrick a great place to live for everyone with the community playing a key role in making that happen.
We have been working towards that by inviting people to join us in making Carrick a great place to live and doing stuff!
Our Theory of Change is - if we listen, and include people, stuff will happen, people will have a go and Carrick will be a great place to live.
What we do emerges from our conversations and relationships with people in Carrick and in the last two years we have focused on developing arts events in our Town Hall which we want to turn into and arts centre, and developing Carrick Greengrocers, which is the first community owned greengrocers in Northern Ireland.
Any success stories to share?
We were really proud to bring a Mencap pilot, My Community, to Carrickfergus - one of nine projects across the UK and the only pilot in NI. This project has focused on making Carrickfergus a great place to live for people with learning disabilities so it fits really well with our own goals. The project has resulted in people with learning disabilities becoming volunteers in Carrick Greengrocers and attending our events as ordinary members of our community, achieving our goals and those of Mencap.
We also ran a community share offer to raise the start up finance for Carrick Greengrocers. It was the first community share offer in Carrickfergus and was a very new idea to most people. Nevertheless, we raised over £34,000 from 434 people who are now co-owners of our community business which is a cooperative.
In January, we produced a rehearsed reading of a new play written by a Carrick playwright and actor, Maria Connolly, the Carrickfergus Women's Wine Drinking Club.
The reading was performed by a group of actors, including Maria and Marie Jones, in Carrick Town Hall to a full house who had a hilarious night out in the depths of January. A play about Carrickfergus, debuted in Carrickfergus, that ended with a standing ovation, which is unheard of for a rehearsed reading!
If you're from a town where things like that don't usually happen, you'll know how amazing it felt to make something like this happen!
What motivated to you join NICVA?
One of the big reasons we joined NICVA was because of our relationship with Leeann Kelly (Impact Practice Manager) and the Impact Practice Network. We're really keen to learn from others and share our learning and the network is a great way to do that. We are also considering some changes to our legal structure and we know we can get good advice from NICVA.
How can people support you?
We are always keen to find out what skills and experience people can contribute to what we're doing in Carrick cos we know that there are loads of untapped skills, resources and expertise in our communities that we can use together to improve our places for everyone.
So if you've got something you can share with others in Carrick, get in touch by emailing: [email protected].
You can also come to our events in the Town Hall and shop in Carrick Greengrocers. You can find out what's coming up by subscribing to our newsletter on our website positivecarrickfergus.org
