January is always a good time for reflection. In this blog, I wanted to look back over what’s happened since a few Leithers heard the news about Leith St Andrew’s Parish Church being sold off and decided to do something about it.
What started as a couple of local charities and not-for-profit organisations looking for a new venue has turned into something much bigger. A mission to keep the Leith St. Andrew’s building in community hands, as a centre for activities and events that support health and wellbeing for all.
To make this a reality, a small group of volunteers have been working away on three boring-sounding but important areas:
- Funding and finance
- Governance
- Consultation
Funding and finance
Buying a church is expensive. Before we could even think about raising money to purchase the building, we had to find money to pay architects, business planners and chartered surveyors. These people would help figure out if it was possible and sustainable for Leith St. Andrew’s Trust to be run as a community centre. We also needed reports from these people before we could apply for some bigger funding pots, to show that our plans were realistic and that the money would be used sensibly.
So our finance committee got to work! Each application took days of work to research and plan, but we were successful in receiving tens of thousands of pounds worth of funding or consultancy time from:
- National Lottery Heritage Fund
- Architectural Heritage Fund
- Community Enterprise
We’ll be able to share the findings of the feasibility reports soon, and hope that we’ll be able to apply for the next stage of funding after that.
In amongst all this, we also had to apply for a bank account for receiving funding. But we couldn’t do that until we had a more formal status as an organisation, which brings us to governance…
Governance
It turns out that not just anyone can apply for funding or buy a church on behalf of the community! We had to move from an informal group to a formal charity, setting out our purpose and rules in writing. This was a lengthy process, involving some tricky decisions on how to define the geographical community of Leith St Andrew’s.
In between funding applications we drafted all the documents required by OSCR, the Scottish Charity Regulator, to become an official charity and held our founding Annual General Meeting to elect trustees.
We were officially registered as a new charity, Leith St. Andrew’s Trust, on the 11th June 2024 by OSCR and elected five local trustees a few days later.
As well as keeping minutes of our meetings and our accounts, governance defines how Leith St. Andrew’s Trust can operate, who can be a member and what we’re trying to achieve. The funding we got to pay consultants means that we also now have a first draft of a business plan. Having a financially sustainable business plan is another important part of good governance.
If you want to help shape the future of Leith St. Andrew’s Trust and refine our plans, we’ll be sharing more info soon on how you can volunteer, become a member or even become a trustee.
Consultation
We’ve got some brilliant volunteers working on community engagement and consultation (they’re the ones responsible for the best bits of our social media!), which is a really important part of the project. We need to know if other Leithers are excited to see the church become community owned, and what you want to see happen there in future!
So over the past year, we’ve surveyed Leithers online and in person. We had a stall at Leith Gala Day, organised an open day in Leith St. Andrew’s itself, and collected 100s of responses to our surveys, which have been overwhelmingly positive. We’ve contacted other local organisations and venues to share our plans and seek feedback, some of whom have even written formal letters of support for our plans.
We’ve shared news on social media and tracked progress on our website so people know what we’re up to. And most recently, we embarked on a history project led by researcher Julian Grant. While we’re looking to the future, this project hopes to celebrate the history of everything that the Leith St. Andrew’s building has been until now. You can read more about the project in Julian’s blogs, starting here.
Summary and next steps
So, 2024 was a busy one for us, and 2025 is looking no different! We’ve built some strong foundations over the last year and this year we hope to expand membership and volunteers for Leith St. Andrew’s Trust, move forward with securing more funding for lease or purchase of the church building and of course, our history project will culminate with an event and exhibition at the end of February. The exhibition will launch on Friday 21st February and be open over the following two weekends, with a special panel event on Wednesday 26th February. We’d love to welcome as many Leithers there as possible.