Glenkens & District Community Action Plan Steering Group Annual Report 2025
2025 has been another year of effective delivery of the Glenkens & District Community Action Plan priorities. Frontline delivery projects have been consolidated and evolved to deliver excellent outcomes for Glenkens residents, despite the extremely challenging external context of restricted funding landscape and limited available public sector support.
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In addition, the CAP Steering Group has been strongly advocating for the rural voice to be heard at regional and national levels – working to alleviate some of the challenges our communities face at a systemic, upstream level, rather than just intervening to mitigate the symptoms.
Rural communities are at the heart of the long-term economic and wellbeing prosperity of Dumfries and Galloway and the whole of Scotland, not least through their contributions to food production, timber production and energy generation. This needs to be recognised and valued by urban decision makers, not just seen as inefficient cost bases from which resources can be extracted.
This advocacy is extremely challenging work, requiring the ongoing support of huge amounts of volunteer time and in the face of a significant power imbalance between hyper-local community development organisations and national and regional agencies.
There is recognition at the highest policy level that retaining an active and diverse population in our rural areas is important to the long-term prosperity of Scotland but the challenge for us all is how we achieve this in the long term when faced with the short-term challenges and drivers of decisions.
However, we have continued to make good partnerships and build relationships towards achieving common outcomes, and this report evidences the concrete gains that can be made towards supporting sustainable rural communities for all our benefit, by mitigating rural disadvantage and averting rural depopulation through Community Wealth Building principles and long-term holistic strategies.