Ledbury Focus September 2019 Ledbury Focus September 2019 v2 | Page 34
LEDBURY & DISTRICT CI
W
hat do you know about the Ledbury and
District Civic Society and what we do?
Let me give you an introduction and then tell
you more in future issues of the Ledbury
Focus.
We are a local charity which gives grants to local
community groups, schools, other charities,
individuals and businesses in Ledbury and the
surrounding parishes. The grants must meet our
charitable objectives which are in boring legal
language but can be summed up as “Looking after
Ledbury”. Normally the grants are quite small (up
to a few hundred pounds) but we can make quick
decisions and there is hardly any paperwork! Most
of our grants are to ‘one off ’ projects but we do
also provide regular support, for example to the
Poetry Festival and Ledbury in Bloom.
How do we get the money for these grants? We
run the Burgage Hall in Church Lane (the one
with the cobbles) and it is hired out to all sorts of
people and groups. After our running costs it
produces surplus funds for our grants. We also
own and run the Butcher Row House Museum.
This is free but visitors are often generous with
their donations and we sell a small range of items,
many of which we produce ourselves. We publish
and print the popular Heritage Trail leaflet which
sells around 1,000 copies a year from local shops,
as well as the Butcher Row House Museum and
the Heritage Centre. We don’t receive any
government or council funding, apart from a little
bit of gift aid on donations.
We are a membership organisation and apart from
a few life members, everyone pays a £10
subscription each year. For that they get a twice-
yearly newsletter and free entry to our monthly
talks, and the satisfaction of knowing their
subscriptions help to “Look after Ledbury”. The
talks are held at 7.30pm in the Burgage Hall on the
last Friday of every month apart from July, August
and December, and cover a wide range of topics.
Anyone can come to the talks which cost £5 for
non-members. The talks between now and
Christmas are listed below. Do come along if they
interest you. Everything we do is done by
volunteers, so we have very low costs.
What else do we do apart from giving grants,
running our buildings and arranging talks? Well,
we look at every planning application in Ledbury
and the surrounding area. Then we either support
them, object to them or ask for changes. In
important applications we sometimes encourage
our members to send in their own comments to
the planners. It’s not just housing we look at,
although there has been a lot of that recently! We
also look at applications to fell or do work on
protected trees, long term plans and strategy
34
To advertise call 01684 833715 or email: [email protected]