We are currently working toward receiving the Volunteer Friendly Award. The panel has been very fortunate to have a fantastic volunteer Bill Condy who is completing the five strands to obtain the award. Bill has worked for many years and has retired and is looking to help where ever he can. Bill is a wonderful asset for the panel.

Renfrewshire Council’s Education department are currently updating their accessibility strategy for disabled children in schools and we held a meeting with Tony McEwan who is head of schools in Renfrewshire. The meeting was a great success and we are looking forward to working with them to update the strategy and ensure that Renfrewshire Schools are fully accessible.

For many years now we have been working with Clyde Muirshiel Regional Park (Castle Semple for the locals) and within the last year we have assisted the park to obtain funding from the Postcode Community Trust for 2 bell boats and more recently we have obtained funding from The Big Lottery for side by side bikes which we hope to be able to order soon.

The bell boats are so popular that before they arrived at the park there was a waiting list for them. We currently have a competition in local schools to name the boats and hope to have the naming ceremony soon and we will update with photos of the day.

Last October, we were contacted by Linwood High School to ask if we could assist with providing work experience for 2 pupils with physical disabilities. We were delighted to assist and we had a young lady called Shannon for 9 weeks and subsequently in February we had a young gentleman called Kyle, both of the students were fantastic. Our secretary then raised this issue with the CEO of Engage Renfrewshire our TSI as these were not the only pupils concerned. We discovered that disabled children up and down the country were facing the same problem.

Morven felt very passionate about the problems faced by the students, that it led to being raised at various meetings.   The result has been that Renfrewshire Poverty Commission has now taken this on board and have funded the panel to provide adaptions, training and access audits for 10 work experience places for children from Kersland School and Mary Russell School’s both the schools are in Paisley. We have currently found 8 placements for the children and adaptions are being installed.

At the present time the 2 charities involved in providing work experience are ourselves and the Environmental Training Team (ETT). This is an amazing project working in co-production with the Poverty Commission, Engage Renfrewshire, ETT and Renfrewshire Access Panel and we are looking forward to the induction day which we are holding in our office soon.

The ETT Boys below

We are delighted that Shannon has come back to work with us for your work experience,  we are so happy to see you in good health and still as funny as before 🙂 🙂

We are now well under way with the Volunteer Friendly Portfolio thanks to Bill Condy our volunteer for completing the award application for us and we are very grateful for the help