Community Choices: Submit your ideas now

If you have an idea for a project that could benefit your local area, submit your proposal to Community Choices now.

Community Choices is Falkirk Council and Falkirk Health & Social Care Partnership’s participatory budgeting programme.

It gives local people a way to submit a proposal for public money to improve their local area and vote to decide how public money is spent.

Two grants are available:

• Small Grant: up to £5,000 for projects that will make a real difference to the lives of people living in each ward; or
• Place-based Capital Grant: to support proposals that need a capital investment of more than £5,000 to build something new, improve an asset or purchase equipment.

Projects must aim to make your community either fairer, healthier, more connected or more inclusive.

Projects that meet the criteria of the grant applied for will be put to a public vote in January 2023 and must secure at least 10% of the total eligible votes cast in that ward to secure Community Choices funds.

Closing date for submissions is Friday, 2 December.

Community benefit

Securing Place-based Capital funds of £39,800 helped Falkirk Golf Club make its clubhouse more accessible for all members of the community to use and its 18-hole golf course more playable for golfers of all ages.

Nicky Barr, Club Captain, said Community Choices had helped the club become “far more inclusive”.

He said: “People with mobility issues and wheelchair users can now access the clubhouse more easily and if playing golf navigate around the course using the new paths work.”

For Falkirk Made Friends, securing a Small Grant of £4,706 helped the group buy materials to create an eye-catching mural (pictured) to celebrate the world-famous products made by Falkirk’s foundries.

Dr Duncan Comrie, Secretary said: “Our Community Choices award gave us the fuel to tap into the creative furnace of Ironheart achievements, allowing us to design the mural and buy materials to make it happen.”

Cecil Meiklejohn, Leader of Falkirk Council, added: “We are starting to see the fruits of the first two rounds of Community Choices, with several projects having already come to fruition and others well on their way to realising the benefits they sought to achieve.

“Projects that have successfully secured Community Choices funds have been diverse and wide-ranging coming for community groups large and small, each bringing to life the aims of the initiative – to make the Falkirk area and the communities that live within it fairer, healthier, more connected, or more inclusive.

“I hope the success of the first two rounds will inspire more people to apply this time round and to vote when the time comes, exercising their right to decide where public money is spent in their local area.”