June Update

The first week of June is nationally known as Volunteers Week. We had ordered some volunteer certificates and fully intended to host an awards/rewards evening for all our wonderful volunteers. In the end, we didn't get time to do this, and at present, we are considering making it after our Polmontfest event on the 29th of August. We did an awful lot of planting, especially sunflowers, with a thousand sunflower seedlings popping up all around throughout the whole of June in our newly built planters, which we made from donated wood from a collaboration donation between the district council and Jewsons, along with a load of upcycled wood and equipment we had lying around. This meant the charity didn't need money to build the planters.

We had a visit from Falkirk Council's Climate Group, and we had a long meeting with a company about upgrades and smart building technology upgrades. These upgrades we were hoping to pay for from the District Pride in Place fund we were applying for. We applied for quite a lot of money and are pleased to announce that we have been granted £8,500 to upgrade our transition to LED lighting. The management team attended a forum held at Music Broth in Glasgow, hosted by Circular Communities Scotland. This was a knowledge-sharing event and also a great opportunity to network with other sharing libraries (watch this space).

Our chosen contractor for the emergency repair work was hard at work throughout June on our emergency repairs. That work is now complete. The whole East and West Wing is now fully wind and water-tight, with some seriously neglected paintwork now looking brand new. We put a new sign up, and with the cold water tank removed, the place is looking entirely different—a rejuvenation of a building that had been condemned as fit only for demolition by some. This rejuvenation was achieved thanks to a lot of extremely hard work from the hub's unpaid volunteer management team. The new group, a collaboration between Open Book and the Hub, a book reading group, completed its trial. That was such a success it is now going on to be a regular event. See our bookings Calander for more info. We applied for a number of grants over the month, including two different grants for gardening equipment for our transition from monoculture grass to permaculture. Land as large as ours is going to need a lot of plants and equipment to be manageable.

We received 50 new (to us) seats that were put in the cinema room. The district council had sent out an email asking if groups wanted these. We asked for 50, which community services collected from St. Mungo's School and delivered to us. We had to condct a few risk assessments for various groups while the ongoing repair work,was happening especially at the link corridor, this risk assessing was ongoing for all the workscope including building materials storage. We had been given an opportunity to apply for some pro bono work on our Sustainable Urban Drainage System by an internationally respected group of civil engineers. After many meetings and the long application process, we didn't receive this free help, but it did highlight that we have to give this issue some serious thought, along with our other transitions toward a human-centric life system. Now that we're at the design stage of that transition, it's time to reimagine the whole site! What would you, dear reader, like to see here in 5, 10, or 50 years' time? We've been asking many groups for feedback on what they would like to see changed and what they like the most about the hub that they would not like changed. This is ongoing, at our monthly meetings. Our Friends of the Hub meetings are a very friendly gathering of people with a shared purpose. These meetings are a pleasure to attend, a place where we adopt a can-do attitude and work together towards our shared future. We can all be positive about all the good stuff that's happening, and positivity continues to grow at the hub.

The tinnitus group invited the management team into their support group, as they wanted the sustainability manager to explain about the green social prescribing. He was also glad to attend, as he has hearing issues and was interested in the audiology presentation that was at that support group meeting. It's good for the management team to find out what various support groups need to plan in at the hub, because, for example, the paint colors of our emergency repairs and maintenance work were chosen to be dementia-friendly. This form of colour selection will now be designed into the hub's future-proofing plans and design upgrades. Colour choices are more important than we ever imagined in making your space inclusive welcoming and safe for all.

A young filmmaker has done a couple of videos for us during June, which we will add to our YouTube page coming soon. We applied for £3 million from the National Lottery, and then on the 18th of June, we attended a meeting with the district's councils' resilience team, climate and energy team, Forth Environmental Link, and the Conservation Volunteers at Larbert's council offices. This productive meeting was mostly around the planning of Polmontfest and the district's community education towards climate adaptation, biodiversity loss and extreme weather events. All in all june was an incredibly successful month, the last day of june was the end of our second successful financial year. Our bookkeeper and treasure worked until 10pm to get as many bills and invoices out as possible before the end of our financial year, so that we had as much spent in last years budget that had to be so as not be carried over into our third years budget. This has been an incredibly successful second year thanks to the volunteers hard work and diligence which means careful and persistent effort or work, showing thorough attention to what matters. We are extremely lucky to have such a diligent bookkeeper as will be shown in the end of year report. Our next General Meeting is on Wednesday 12th August at Polmont Community Hub.