BEHIND THE SCENES

Atlantis’s AGM on March 13 heard that, after a few tough years, 2015-16 saw us able to begin building our free reserves back up. As Atlantis is a social enterprise run for the benefit of the community (rather than shareholders), all surplus is held to reinvest when it is needed.

As these reports show, there’s always something needs doing in the building, and a ‘rainy day fund’ ensures the centre can stay open even when unexpected costs come along.

The AGM also saw Andy Newiss of RA Clement step down as our financial director after 13 years’ hard work as a volunteer for the organisation. Thanks for all your hard work, Andy.

Lighting, hot water and more

Since the last Behind the Scenes (BtS) report, Resource Efficient Scotland has visited Atlantis and have identified several energy-saving opportunities around the centre.

In particular, LED lighting would immediately begin saving us money. Unfortunately, LED lighting is quite expensive so we will need to consider how best to fund this. We hope to have the final report by the next BtS report, and it would be great to think that soon after that we would have a brighter, lighter (and cheaper to run) centre.

Fundraising

As this month’s report shows, fundraising is something Atlantis has to do on an ongoing basis. We have got a number of ideas that will be requiring some significant funding and we will be working on these over the next few months. Watch this space.

Parking

We have been able to create a way that we think we can protect parking for customers when the council start making the main car park at Atlantis pay and display. We’ll release a special BtS report on this within the next few weeks.

Just completed

The following items have been completed in the past few weeks:

■ An update on toilet facilites from last month – you may have noticed the new hand dryer in the cafe toilets. We are testing this to ensure it is a suitable hand dryer for other areas in the centre. This is the first tiny step towards improving our facilities, and there are plenty more to come as we determine how much financial support we can attract to help us do so.

■ The two cubicle showers in the wet side changing rooms have been improved with new tiled floors making them more accessible than the old raised shower trays.

■ The dry side disabled changing room was refurbished with a new floor and LED lighting as the floor had degraded to a point where the room was unusable.

■ Staff training: Jade McEwan passed her Body Attack qualification and Rebecca qualified to train Body Balance, so watch out for these newly minted trainers in your classes.