The Press and Journal (Inverness, Highlands, and Islands)
New ideas for landowners in Covid wake
Community landowners should have a formal role with statutory bodies to provide local services, a new report concludes.
Owning Our Future says there is a “compelling argument” for community organisations bridging the gap between the state and the individual.
The report comes from research on how community-owned areas responded to Covid and how residents see areas developing post-Covid.
In many cases, community owners were “first responders” during lockdown, helping to deliver food and medicines.
They provided a range of other help, including to vulnerable people and the mentally ill.
The report also highlights issues facing communityowned areas such as lack of affordable housing and poor broadband.
In 2020, Community Land Scotland (CLS) was awarded funding to help communities recover post-pandemic.
Owning Our Future was made by five landowners, all members of CLS.
They include Coigach Community Development Company (CCDC) in the north-west Highlands which created an emergency committee for its lockdown response.
It involved getting food to residents and emergency packs containing PPE for people looking after anyone who was ill.
A crisis fund was set up using money from a community wind turbine.
South West Mull and Iona Development (SWMID) organised a community bus to deliver food and a phone “ring round” to check on people.
The trust also provided informal mental health advocacy and support services in the community.
The report says the pandemic catapulted community landowners into being “de facto frontline service providers”.
It highlights the growing importance of communityled groups in delivering hyper-local support and development functions.
“Community landowners embody such support precisely because of their status as ‘anchor’ organisations trusted by and embedded within their individual communities”, the report says.
“As Scotland emerges from the pandemic it therefore seems timely and legitimate to consider what future role community landowners might potentially play in relation to services provision and development in support of their local communities.”
It acknowledges public sector agencies are doing their best.
“Be that as it may, there is a compelling argument to be made about the space between the state and the individual, and the role community organisations can play in bridging it.
“Exploring community empowerment in practice could be fruitful terrain.
“Coigach’s wind turbine is a good illustration of how community ownership of assets enables financial resources to be generated for retention and reinvestment in the community.
The report suggests existing and future policies can be used.
CLS chairwoman Ailsa Raeburn said the project aimed to understand why communities responded so quickly to the pandemic.