The award will be predominantly directed towards helping fund equipment and staff time for our Community Food Project, with the remainder allowing us to grow and improve our Tool Sharing Library for the Stirlingshire community. We will use the funding to buy equipment for both projects and to provide further staff time to open the projects for longer.
The Tool Sharing library has just over 1000 members, with members borrowing, on average, 2500 tools per year, saving the community approximately £160,000 and 19t CO2e per year from not having to buy new tools. The Community Food project serves 50-60 people per day and has saved almost 100 tonnes of food; or the equivalent of over 240,000 meals from going to waste.
Both projects are run by part-time staff and 40-50 volunteers at any one point in time, and supported by our part-time volunteer coordinator. In the last 6 months, three of those volunteers have joined our staff steam and a further 6 have gone on to other employment.
