Bags Full of Love is a charity operating in West Dunbartonshire for children in Foster & kinship care. We provide children coming in to care with a backpack filled with new essential items and clothing so that the carer does not have to rush out shopping and can spend quality time getting to know the child in their care, this also gives the child a chance to settle in their new home and have new items just for them which gives comfort on probably the worst day of their lives. The money will be used for buying stock for our bags and for as each bag costs between £70-£100 depending on the childs age.  Last year we distributed 45 bags to children in West Dunbartonshire.

We are a social enterprise engaging people in West Dunbartonshire with the arts. We are passionate about breaking down barriers, or perceived barriers, to participation. We work in areas of deprivation and with people with additional support needs. We will run a number of trips for young people aged 3-25 to see professional theatre/performance. Young people aged 3-25 from throughout West Dunbartonshire will benefit from the project. Our aim is to have 100 people attend the theatre as a part of this project. 

Sessions at the horticulture project at Knowetop form part of the recovery programme offered by Alternatives to clients in its community-based and residential programmes. Our Into Nature programme of afterschool and school holiday sessions, runs from March to October and there is a range of outdoor activities, storytelling, and nature inspired art and crafts. We also work with schools, and to date 108 children from the 2 local primaries have taken part in our schools programme. This funding will be used to develop and deliver a programme of outdoor activities at Knowetop for 11 to 18 year olds, providing young people with opportunities to experience nature and take part in workshops to learn new practical skills. This project is aimed at young people between 11 and 18 years old from anywhere across West Dunbartonshire. Our programme to date has focused more on younger children, and we’ve identified a gap in our provision for this age group.

Silverton Summerplay was a group set up over 25 years ago by a group of parents with children at Knoxland Primary, Braehead Primary and St Patrick’s Primary to give the children in p4-p7 a week of fun activities in the summer.  We are now a committee of 12 volunteer parents from the 3 primary schools who continue this on an annual basis.  We meet as a committee every 2 months to plan fundraising events and also the fun week.  Our fundraising consists of discos for over 100 children as well as an annual bag packing in a local supermarket.  These funds are then used to book a fun day at Knoxland and various days out visiting parks and amusement parks.  This funding will be used to cover the costs of the coaches we hire for the trips and also towards the park entrance for the children. All families who take part in the summerplay week will benefit.  The cost of the week has been £50 and any additional funding would help to keep the cost of the trip to this level with the cost of the buses increasing over the last few years.

We run our Scout activities from the Scout Hall, Old Kilpatrick. We currently have 82 members within the group.The weekly meetings are structured to allow time for play and learning new skills through organised and approved badge work. If we were successful in our application, we would like to replace the current Xpelair fan heaters with a Mitsubishi Heavy Industry 10KW R32 multi-split air conditioner unit. This unit uses lower GWP refrigerant. Therefore, this new unit would substantially reduce our energy consumption, provide a cleaner air source as well as cutting our carbon footprint. In addition to the use by the whole of the Scout Group the facility is also used by other community groups including, a local theatre group, toddler's music group and a ballroom dancing group.