Churchills Local Nature Reserve in Newton Abbot: Pictured left to right are: Neil Harris, Teignbridge Ranger, Leo Henley-Lock, Teignbridge Ranger, Cllr George Gribble, executive member for Communities, Recreation and Leisure, and Ross Birbeck, local grazier

Newton Abbot will have new sheep graving land at its Churchills Local Nature Reserve with the help of a £8,957 funding boost from the SITA Trust.

With the funding a special sheep-grazing area will be created at the reserve, which is set on the hillsides of Highweek and provides an important lowland limestone grassland, a priority habitat for wildflowers and lots of local wildlife, including the Marbled White Butterfly.

The reserve’s steep slopes make cutting the long grass difficult, and to help protect flora, fauna and wildlife the council wants to return to the traditional method of letting sheep keep the long grass in check.

The project means new fencing for the area, helping keep the animals safe during the two periods of the year when they’ll be brought in to trim the grass.

The sheep will be brought on to the land in March – April and September – October each year as long as ground conditions allow, helping maintain an ideal grass height.  The sheep are owned and cared for by a local farmer.

The council is contributing £1,030 towards the project, which is expected to be complete by mid February.

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You may already know that our children get a raw deal on schools funding. Every pupil at school in central London for example get thousands more spent on them than is spent in Plymouth. Even less is spent, per pupil, in Devon. What you might not know is that the raw deal doesn’t stop there.

Take the police. The police budget for Devon and Cornwall last year was a little over £268 million, which works out at about £159 for every man, woman and child in the region. That is less, per resident, than 35 other forces in England and Wales – which is almost all of them. In fact, the force gets £40 less per person than the average for England and Wales. If Devon and Cornwall got the average per resident funding it would receive an extra £68 million per year, the equivalent of the combined starting salaries of an extra 3,000 constables.

Six forces get more than £200 per person: Gwent (£201), the West Midlands (£209), Greater Manchester (£212), Cleveland (£223), Merseyside (£235), the London Met (£342), and the City of London’s own force (an amazing £6,412 per resident!).

How do we change this? Well, we could start by binning ID card plans straight away. They are a massive waste of money, and an alien intrusion into traditional British liberties. The money saved could pay for thousands more police officers, which would start to make up for our local shortfall.

• Who’da thought it, to bin ID cards to pay for actual police? Comments below, please!

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The Conservatives have been shelling out shed loads of dosh in the Newton Abbot constituency for ages (number 80 on their hit list) in their attempt to promote Anne Marie Morris, but where has all the money been coming from?

There was the infamous flyer (with the wrong NHS number on), there have been iddy-biddy newspaper type things, and they’ve managed to fund a (nearly) half-page ad in the Mid-Devon Advertiser (etc) on page two for goodness knows how long – and that doesn’t come cheap. Is there any nom dom dosh involved?

We got in touch with the Anne Marie Morris team to ask if any of Lord Ashcroft’s lucre was involved – it has been said he’s been ploughing it into the marginals, after all.

What we found out was that the Newton Abbot Conservatives had a very good team of local fundraisers, and if we want to know more we should check the expenses which will be filed within a month of the result being declared.

So much for our investigative ‘asking’.

• With a millionaire Conservative standing in Central Devon, and loads being spent by the Anne Marie Morris team, is the political machine too dependent on dosh? Comments below, please

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The Football League is stretching its green legs and calling on clubs to be more environmentally friendly, and already Exeter City is leading the way.

It’s part of a new partnership between the Football League Trust and the Environment Agency to improve environmental performance – such as cutting energy, water and waste, and to promote green issues with communities. The move sees funding to all of the 72 League One and League Two clubs in England and Wales partially linked to improvements in environmental performance.

Football League Trust general manager Dave Edmundson said: “Improvements won’t happen at every club overnight, but some like Exeter City have already made great strides by introducing a range of environmental initiatives.

“These include harvesting rainwater for their training pitches, using environmentally friendly cleaning materials, installing energy and water saving devices, encouraging the use of sustainable transport to matches and improving and promoting waste recycling by housing a community waste recycling centre at their ground.”

Former Tottenham Hotspur and England player, Exeter City’s director of football, Steve Perryman told the PRSD: “It’s important for everyone to consider the impact they have on the environment and football clubs are no exception. By looking at ways we can reduce our carbon footprint and by recycling as much as we can, Exeter City is not only acting responsibly but is saving money too.”

The Football League Trust, which oversees Community and Youth Development activities at Football League clubs, currently work with supporters and local communities across four main issues: social inclusion/community cohesion, health, education and sports participation. The environment has become the fifth issue.

• Comments below, please

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Exeter-based Kaleido Arts – the only South West regional arts organisation that is disability led – is facing the withdrawal of Arts Council funds, which would lead to its closure. Director Ralf Togneri explains what’s so different about the non-discriminatory Kaleido and why its unique expertise shouldn’t be lost. Over to you Ralf…

Kaleido is in being to open opportunities to all deaf and disabled people in the South West who want to participate in the arts.

We don’t discriminate against art-forms or different types and levels of disability. We don’t discriminate between audience members and participants, makers or creatives.

We do support any deaf or disabled artist who wants our help. We take about 350 – 450 calls a year from artists, some beginners, to full time professionals. We also work with lots of agencies – mainstream theatres, galleries and dance venues as well as disability groups and support organisations. We have links throughout England especially with the other, surviving disability arts organisations (four others have closed down in the last five years).

The Arts Council said we supported only seven artists last year – that is only seven artists with whom we work who fit the arts council data collection mold! We support more artists than that – we are in regular contact with over 700 people and support on average four or five artists a week using the figures we collected.

What’s so different about us? We are the only South West regional arts organisation that is disability led. By putting money into Kaleido instead of many small, local, unlinked organisations, which should have happened as well, means that cross county developments such as dance with Velcro in Gloucestershire and Remix in Dorset working in a joint programme with CanDoCo (national integrated dance company) would not have happened. Because of our unique position in the South West, linked to many different artists and many different mainstream and disability organisations, we are able to increase the reach of any activity and the number of potential participants.

To reiterate: we are the only SW arts organisation that is disability led, so we have a breadth of knowledge and expertise, in short, experience that no other organisation in being at the moment can possibly have. That experience is being thrown away lightly.

We have been criticised for not generating external funding over and above our arts council grant. If it was that easy why did the arts council have to invent its sustain fund to bail out organisations like the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra to the tune of half a million pounds this year? So we are in the same position as many other arts organisations but we are castigated for it while they receive bigger support funding.

To summarise:
1. we are in regular contact with over 700 people and support on average seven artists a week which is over 300 a year
2. we are the only South West regional arts organisation that is disability led, while the Arts Council South West  employ no disabled staff at all
3. current financial environment has made it hard to get match funding.

• Help it fight the decision to stop funding Kaleido by writing to the Arts Council. Address your letters to Alan Davey, chief executive of the Arts Council, at Arts Council England, 14 Great Peter Street, London, SW1P 3NQ or email chiefexecutive@ artscouncil.org.uk

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The People-Centred Economic Development, based in Gloucestershire, has been redefining profit for in human terms. Jeff Mowatt from the company spoke about the social business

Explain your business.
We’re called People-Centered Economic Development, in essence a business with a primary social objective, a social ROI. We began in 1996 with a founding paper describing a new more inclusive economic model for the information age, with the same name as our business.

What’s your background?
P-CED started in the US in 1997 following the founding paper and and by 1999 was working in Russia to source a development initiative and microfinance bank which created 10,000 small enterprises in the city of Tomsk.

We launched in the UK in 2004, deriving revenue from an ongoing software development business.

Why do your ethics play such a strong role in your business, and how does it apply to what you do?
Our revenue is deployed in activism and advocacy for human rights and poverty eradication. We believe that any economic model which includes disposability of humans either by genocide or starvation. Hence we are working in Eastern Europe to leverage investment in sustainable development.

What have you achieved with what you do?
Aside from the Tomsk initiative, since incorporation in the UK we’ve researched and submitted a ‘Marshall Plan‘ strategy paper to the US Senate which has begun to have inpact on government policy

What was harder to implement than you thought it would be?
Certainly. At first we tried a UK community broadband proposal but were unable to attract funding for a model based on a guarantee company. This was a year before the introduction of CICs which are based on similar principles, and we would have been difficult to understand. Then our founder, was excluded from the UK as a visitor. Exclusion has been an ongoing problem of many dimensions.

And yet, founder Terry Hallman resident in Ukraine for the last five years where he continues to advocate for the disenfranchised, particularly disabled children, was commended as an example of excellence in BT’s Seen and Heard awards last year.

What has been the unexpected benefit, if any, to you, your business or the community?
What we hadn’t expected was the influence on mainstream economics which came about because of the credit crisis. Now influential business leaders and politicians talk of more inclusive capitalism under various new labels which brings us a long way from publishing an idea on the web 12 years ago. Otherwise influence on the policies of two governments is something I’d not have dreamt of five years ago.

What have you learnt and what advice would you give to others thinking of starting a social enterprise?
I was reminded recently of part of the script of an old film, Inn of the Sixth Happiness.

In the film, Chinese tradition has five “happiness” wishes: wealth, longevity, good health, virtue, and a peaceful old age and death. “Each person must decide in their heart what the sixth happiness is.”

So, my answer would be to pursue that Sixth Happiness whatever is tossed in the way to divert your path.

How do you view the future?
We started off with a ideal, to replicate localised people-centered economics on a global basis. That view remains steadfast and now seems more achievable.

• If you are or know a social or ethical business, get in touch to be featured on the PRSD, email info@peoplesrepublicofsouthdevon.co.uk

Here are some questions for you to get going

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The weekly column from the world of Geoff Clams

Given the media tumult surrounding the Iranian presidential elections, accusations of stolen votes and an inflammatory cultural split, one might be tempted to say that, by comparison, political passions in Britain are either dying, dead or extinct.

Contrast how tepid and lazy we look next to these guys. They don’t feel that the winning ticket is representative, and so they invest their hearts and risk their lives by taking to the streets in their thousands to say so. By comparison, and after decades of being ideologically shunted between the centre and the far-right by two illusory red and blue factions, we just roll over and present our behinds and our livelihoods to whomever is brandishing the lube tube.

Granted, this wasn’t a general election and most are turned-off by Europe because, in all honesty, too few of us are truly informed enough to understand the real implications of the Lisbon Treaty as it stands. What’s more, can an economic bureaucracy like the European Parliament ever look like an arousing or alluring phenomenon? Isn’t there something else on? Can’t we all gawk at some terminally-ill celebrity undergoing chemotherapy instead?

Europe aside, this creeping voter apathy will probably gain momentum, as more and more of us resign ourselves to abject powerlessness and/or misguided protest votes. The recent MPs’ expenses debacle has certainly tickled our anger buds (evidently, it seems that the British are more prone to hate a scrounger than a war criminal/torture apologist/authoritarian creep) but the consensus is, that our ruling elite will soon roll out some new, corrective legislation and the nation’s boiling blood will inevitably cool. What a shame that would be. If we do get the election the majority of us so vehemently demand, can we even trust it to be free and fair? Will we all go back to sleep after the dust has settled and give the Tories a blank cheque mandate?

It is worth taking a retrospective look at our recent elections, now that we have the distance of hindsight. Not just for what the results tell us about the perceived rise in fascism or the death of the New Labour project or whatever else, but to examine the conduct of the polling itself. As more and more political bloggers seem to be invoking the term “Dark Arts” in their analyses of June 4, it seems that a disconcerting picture could still be emerging. Therefore, I would like to relay what happened to me the week I went to the polls.

I live in a very quiet road in Preston (Paignton), tucked away behind the Shorton Valley within a friendly and supportive community. We have many neighbors who are elderly and, who by-and-large, are passionately-engaged voters who still cling to the lifeboat ideal of democracy. It was, after all, their generation’s young men who truly fought and died for this abstract concept. Since polling day, my partner and I have had many over-the-fence conversations with our neighbours and we’ve been able to compare our recent experiences with them. If what we seem to be uncovering is a country-wide phenomenon, then ‘We The People’ are indeed entering the realms of the truly fantastical.

On Monday the 1st, I was returning from a meeting with Project Duvall out in Buckfastleigh. As I mentioned last week, they are a Devon-wide arts committee who meet every fortnight to discuss cultural projects and to lobby for potential funding. Overall, it had been a productive meeting up until my being very publicly sick again. Hence, I was feeling a bit jittery after an unpleasant and introspective drive back to Torbay.

As I pulled into my road, which is a cul-de-sac that branches off from a deathly steep hill, I forgot to drop gears and the car stalled. While fumbling with my keys in the bluish nine o’ clock twilight, I noticed an intense buzzing noise in the near distance. I couldn’t ascertain at first whether it was a far-off lawnmower or a close-by hornet, but it was indescribably high-pitched. Looking up the hill, where the local polling booth had just been erected, I noticed something no larger than a small suitcase suspended in the air and silhouetted against the bruising sky. It promptly zipped out of view with a weird serpentine confidence before I had any chance to get a lingering look. Dismissing the object as either another hallucination or an oddly-shaped night bird, I restarted my car and trundled to my driveway. As the night got thicker and followed me to bed, so too a sense of malicious, creeping dread.

In the earliest hours of the following morning, whilst I was shifting and turning in the throes of sleeplessness, the noise reappeared. Much, much louder this time. Opening my eyes, I watched a singular red dot of light centering itself on the bedroom curtains. It turned green momentarily and then back to red. I leaped from the bed and hurtled towards the window, yet, again it hurried off and the buzzing soon became distant. Elusive. Needless to say, I didn’t sleep a further wink and decided to get up at around seven.

On my way back from the newsagents that very same morning, I was invited to share a cider (Al fresco) with my good, kindly neighbour Hugh, who lives at number four. Hugh is a pensioner, originally from Rotherham, who served in the RAF for thirty or so years. When he retired from the ranks, he went into local-level politics as a Conservative councillor and spent four years there before leaving to work on his garden. A great conversationalist who never beats about the proverbial bush, Hugh managed to surprise even me when, after a short, comforting summer silence and a sup of cold apple gold, he asked: “So, have you seen The Drone yet?”

“Drone?” I replied, unnerved. “What’s that then?”

“Noisy bloody camera that’s been buzzing around the streets at night,” he wheezed with the corners of his mouth downturned. “Whatever next, eh?”

“I saw it last night. Twice. It’s a camera?”

“A floating, talking camera, aye. Did you not get the leaflet? The local Police are doing a trial with it.”

“Why here? Unless of course they finally caught up with you nicking cuttings from Mrs. Frattelli’s Lobelia every summer.”

Hugh gave me the leaflet to study at home, which I did. The Drone is an unmanned CCTV camera with inbuilt facial recognition technology and sonar-based capabilities. Remarkably lightweight and agile, it is remotely accessed and controlled by the Police themselves and employs a series of tiny propulsive fans to hover about six feet from the ground. The Drone has been designed to combat anti-social behaviour, and is being trialed in six other counties up and down the land. Tossing the leaflet aside I went to my computer to write an email to the Devon and Cornwall Police Constabulary to air my concerns. I have since received a reply, effectively referring me to the IPCC. What’s the point?

Judith and I saw The Drone again that night. This time it was scanning the opposite side of the valley, hovering busily past a succession of living room windows, doing it’s red light/green light thing. Looking through walls no doubt. Perhaps not surprisingly, we both dreamed about the floating camera that night. I was so tired I slept right through.

Come Wednesday o’clock, and with the heady buzz of intimidating synthetic Police fading in our minds, we awoke to a loud and forceful knocking at the front door.

To be continued next week…

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You know how it is when all the cupboards are bare, and you’ve got so many projects you want to pursue but for a little lolly (that’s money to you). We know that feeling only too well. Well, here’s some funding opportunities that have come across our desk

Funding Stuff
Global Music Company supporting music education and encouragement
The aim of this foundation, set up by EMI records, is to support projects that encourage education, in particular for young people, in all aspects of music. Bursary (£5000) and general awards up to £2,500. www.musicsoundfoundation.com

Heritage Lottery funds: Young Roots; Townscape Heritage initiative; Your Heritage. www.hlf.org.uk

Arts Council – Grants for Arts. Activities that benefit people or that help artists and art organisations to carry out their own work. Minimum grant is likely to be £200 and the largest in the region £200,000. www.artscouncil.org.uk

Funding for skate park projects
Gravity Engineering Ltd, a manufacturer of concrete and steel skate parks, is looking to sponsor new skate park projects with donations towards funding of up to £5,000 per project: http://www.gravityparks.co.uk/

Free Website Offer for Your Partnership or Community Group
The Devon Towns Forum is offering all of Devon’s Community Partnerships and Community Groups the chance to apply for a free Website and Training Package worth over £600: info@devontownsforum.org.uk

The Co-operative Community Fund
Community groups, voluntary groups, self-help groups, community charities or local branches of national charities are eligible to apply for grants of between £100 and £2,000. www.co-operative.coop/membership/Community-Fund/

South West Loans Fund
The South West Regional Development Agency (RDA) has announced the launch of a new £10m South West Loans Fund which is now available to help growth-oriented business with viable business plans, as part of the drive for economic recovery. www.businesslink.gov.uk/southwest

Greater Dartmoor LEAF
Greater Dartmoor LEAF is a new publicly funded organisation which has been set up to identify and fund environmental and innovative projects and businesses which will increase the future prosperity of the wider community, within the Greater Dartmoor area of Devon. www.greaterdartmoorLEAF.org.uk

The Future Jobs Fund
The Future Jobs Fund is a new initiative, which will help to generate jobs for those in greatest need, particularly young people, and also in areas of high unemployment. This aims to create 150,000 jobs providing real help for young people and who face significant disadvantages in the labour market. http://www.dwp.gov.uk/futurejobsfund

The Big Lottery Fund and Channel 4s’ The Secret Millionaire have teamed up to give viewers a chance to access funding worth £1 million in grants of between £300 and £10,000. http://secretmillionaire.channel4.com/fund_info.shtml

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A few things over on D+CFilm have caught our eye this week, not least South West Screen’s notion that naming something after a Devon myth alienates people from up-country.

Exeter filmmaker Ashley Thorpe has funding for the latest in his Penny Dreadful series The Hairy Hands from the regional champion (that’s a reference to South West Screen, by the way), but they want to change the title to something, well, a little less Devon.

“I think they’re missing the point and the source of the appeal,” says writer, director and independent filmmaker of the year award winner, who’s recently had his films shown at Cannes, Ashley.

We say it sounds like the thin edge of the culturally homogenized wedge. Have your say over on D+CFilm.

Also on the site is a behind the scenes of the latest Ashley Wing film Robbing Peter, a darkly humorous tale from what we can gather (and a bit of a who’s who in the South Devon filmmaking scene).

Other stories include the announcement of a screenwriter talk at the Exeter Phoenix and a documentary filmmaking course as part of the Dartmoor Arts Summer School.

Got films or film stories, get in touch with D+CFilm on info@devon-cornwall-film.co.uk

posted by Cptn

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Devon County Council is up to win £30,000 for its Renewable Energy for Devon scheme in the local authority section of the famed Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy 2009, which take place in London on Thursday, June 11.

The RE4D scheme (the catchy little monica for Renewable Energy for Devon) muscled its way into the finalist position with the claims of an impressive 109 renewable energy installations in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and community organisations, and a further 18 in domestic properties.

With the creation of 55 jobs, and a further 16 safeguarded through the scheme, you’d think there’d be more crowing about the scheme, which has provided £0.25m in grants and helped secure £0.81m of other funding.

RE4D was launched in 2006 to create jobs and reduce the county’s carbon footprint, and it aims to stimulate demand and build up capacity. It seems to have gone some way with that – to date the figures show a total of installed capacity of over 2 MW, avoiding around 1,300 tonnes/year of CO2 emissions.

Other finalist in the local authority category is Kirklees Council, Huddersfield, for its free-for-all insulation programme.

posted by Cptn

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•This is a new regular column on the adventures of Geoff Clams

On an impossibly sunny and happily recent Thursday, it so happened that I caught the local premiere of John Tomkins’ new feature-length movie, Like an Angel, at Torre Abbey’s Spanish barn.

John is a multi-skilled composer, singer and film-maker from Torquay who, along with his partner Kirsty Symonds, was hosting this special World First screening in aid of Leukemia research. After collaborating on a slew of online videos John and Kirsty (also a singer/songwriter) offer up this, their latest collaboration; a swashbuckling love story that was filmed in and around Torbay and which spans 500 years. The screenplay was written by John himself, who also filmed, edited, produced, funded and scored the picture.

It had been a day of trials. Earlier that afternoon I lost a shoe and some money in the sea and threw up my lunch, all in the space of an hour. In the morning I had left the house early, but had since forgotten all of my Paignton-based life chores and I soon found myself drifting alongside the baked shores.

I was slowly walking to Torquay but had no idea why. Like an Angel is why. An admittedly rough diamond, this film is both a love letter from its director to its leading lady and a barnstorming adventure with inventive special effects and lovable characters to boot.

John’s irrepressible energy frames nearly every shot and for the duration of the film, I was completely entertained. Here is a filmmaker who calls to one’s mind the Renaissance painters of old. A passionate artist who lives by his brush, painting in broad strokes that span the very fabric of time in this bold and beautiful tapestry of love across the ages.

Needless to say, I whistled off into the summer night with my faith in the local arts mostly restored, the film’s big questions still lingering in my mind. If I travelled into the future would my future self be able to see me? What if my future self left the future and went back into the past to see some stuff?

What if when my future self wanted to travel back to the future from the past after seeing some stuff, it arrived in the future too early? What if the other future self was still there, having not yet travelled to the past to see stuff? Would we cancel each other out or would we create two separate time lines in simultaneous, parallel realities? Could these realities exist now? Will we ever unlock them? John Tomkins is a great leading man for local film and the wider creative community should feel extremely proud to have him as their front-runner. Catch Like an Angel when it screens again. You won’t soon forget it.

Anyhow, on that very enchanting evening, I somehow managed to wrangle this here column. I’ll be here every week, spouting. My name is Geoff Clams and I live in Preston on the Torbay Coast. My day job involves designing cultural adventures for a new Buckfastleigh-based steering committee called Project Duvall. I have sat in on two meetings so far and some of the ideas that people are circulating are certainly encouraging. I also enjoy animals, films, books and some television.

Next week, I want to tell you all about some things that happened to me when I went to vote a few nights ago. It’s pretty scandalous stuff.

posted by Geoff Clams

(image: a still from Like and Angel)

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The latest and we suspect the last of the candidates to have got back to us with their election address is Lib Dem Cathie Pannell, who standing for the county council in the South Hams.

Cathie Pannell: Loves area, proud to serve. Fair funding 4 Devon children, affordable housing, better public transport, protect environment
Lib Dem for South Brent and Dartington

To find all the candidates’ (who got in touch) Tweet-sized responses, check out our What Devon candidates have to say in under 140 characters page.

posted by Cptn

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