Community Development Company of Nesting CDCN
Newsletter No 1, November 2016 [DOWNLOAD HERE]
It's almost a year since the first public meeting to save the buildings and land at the Aald Skül site, Vassa, from being put on the open market by Shetland Islands Council (SIC).
Here is our report to let you know what's going on and what has happened so far.
A re-cap of how this got started:
Last autumn the Nesting Local History Group NLHG, lease holder of the Victorian part of the school, reported the deteriorating state of the wooden hut buildings and water ingress into the stone buildings to SIC.
SIC made the property watertight and indicated that they were considering putting the whole property, buildings and land, up for offers of interest.
Fearing that this could lead to the loss of their meeting place home, and the loss of the Nesting & Girlsta UHA burning site, the NLHG organised a public meeting to see what interest there was into buying the property. Those present agreed that they should try and buy the property for community use.
On 21st January we formed a committee to pursue that cause. We have regular and frequent meetings to research ideas on how to use the property, identify funding opportunities and find how we can buy the property in the most affordable way.
What we've achieved so far — we have:
Formed the newly constituted Community Development Company of Nesting — CDCN.
Obtained a grant from National Lottery to value the Aald Skül.
Set up a Scrap Store which has raised over £1100 from sales so far and received additional generous donations of over £300 with more pledged.
Encouraged SIC to fence in the land owned by them at the back of the school.
Obtained a commitment from SIC to consider our bid to buy the Aald Skül.
Made contact with other similar groups who have been a great help to us.
The way forward — we plan to:
Submit more grant applications to the National Lottery to help with registering NDCN as a charity and company limited by guarantee, and pay for help with producing the business plan.
Produce a viable business plan document showing how we can generate a profit from trading activities and keep the whole site in good repair for community use.
Conduct a door-to-door survey in the Nesting community to gather opinions and ideas about how residents would like see the Aald Skül used in future.
Your responses to the survey and any other ideas would be very useful
If you want to know more about CDNC It’s on our Facebook page @aaldskulenterprises and includes:
Our constitution,
List of current committee members, office holders and supporters
Aald Skül site detail and
Current suggestions for the use of the site building and grounds
We hope to produce the CDCN Newsletter on a quarterly basis with No 2 due in February 2017
