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]