This Sunday seems a quieter day on Porty Central matters but I will be spending this afternoon carrying out interviews for the post of Office Admin with the team at my other community project, Bellfield, run by Action Porty. Hopefully we’ll soon be advertising for the Porty Central Development Worker. Porty Central business will come round again with the weekly team meeting taking place tomorrow evening.
Seems a good day to pause, reflect and share the paper Jon put together for our strategy day just after we’d got the Council decision on 20 May. It took the metaphor we’d been kicking around of having a mountain still to climb and fleshed it out. For all the work and triumph on 20 May we’d ‘only’ reached basecamp. As Jon notes, ‘it takes a lot of effort just to get to basecamp’. Most never do. However ‘the gates are still locked, the place is empty and unused.’ Can we get to ‘Camp 1’ when ‘the building can open for a trial event’? No denying ‘lots of infrastructure needs to be put in place to cross the perilous icefall and reach Camp 1’ but that is our next destination We might make it. We might need to turn back. If we do, and we get off the mountain alive, we can plan a re-ascent. I’ll leave you there to browse the document to see how and when we might reach the summit and how we have defined the summit. That can be a topic for a future blog.
Got a mention in The National today on the back of #mylandscotland campaign. Can’t deny I’m happy with the photo, taken courtesy of Ryan Johnston . I think he got my best side!
Of course the article, as is so often the case when you know the story details, gets things a bit wrong. In regard to Portobello Central (which is not named) it says ‘More recently, residents of Portobello have taken additional land into the hands of the community after the City of Edinburgh Council accepted a proposal for community management of its local town hall.’ Maybe they are being prophetic but right now all that was accepted was our right to be at the table to negotiate for the right to community manage Portobello Town Hall.
Don’t forget about The Wash House AGM on Wed 16 June – this week. Tickets need to be booked before to obtain the Zoom link .
Worth noting the 20 mins neighbourhood paper approved by the Policy and Sustainability Committee for the Council on 10th June.
We’ll be preparing for a conversation with Scottish Land Fund on Tuesday morning and the meeting with our consultants on Thursday which might well trigger a big payment from our AHF grant.
Exciting stuff, even on a quiet day.
Jennifer’s blog