A South Staffordshire allotment has been given £3,000 from the Police and Crime Commissioner’s People Power Fund to help prevent anti-social behaviour.
Cheslyn Hay Community Allotment Association has been awarded funding to engage with young children in the area and local schools.
As part of his commitment to local communities, the Commissioner is providing £500,000 in 2015/16 through the People Power Fund in the form of grants of between £100 and £3,000. The fund is supporting locally-driven community safety activities in communities throughout Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent.
Mr Ellis said: “I have significantly increased the funding that local areas in Staffordshire have to make their communities safer.
“The Commissioner’s People Power Fund puts half a million pounds back into local communities and is easy and simple to apply for.
“I am very pleased that the allotments are trying to encourage young children to learn and be part of their community and help reduce anti-social behaviour.”
Colin Bedford, Secretary of Cheslyn Hay Community Allotments Association, said: “By focussing on working together it will develop the younger generations’ respect for community property at the allotments.
“The project will see an intergenerational group producing a video showing the development of a vegetable plot that would have been similar to that used by Cheslyn Hay villagers during World War One.
“The extra benefit for those youngsters involved is that they will see how they become an integral part of the village’s celebration of the contribution that so many villagers made to the Great War and hopefully they will also look to see how they can contribute to the well-being of the village in the future.”
The window for the next round of applications for People Power Funding opens on Sunday 1 March and runs until Tuesday 14 April.
People Power applications need to be sponsored by the group’s local Neighbourhood Police Officer or Police Community Support Officer. More details, including application forms and an animated video about the fund, are available now at www.staffordshire-pcc.gov.uk/fund
The People Power Fund is one part of £2.5 million of Commissioner’s Community Funding for 2014/15. The Commissioner’s Locality Deal Fund has allocated money to local areas through working in partnership with local district and borough councils. Meanwhile, the Commissioner’s Proceeds of Crime Fund is seeing 100 per cent of funding received by Staffordshire Police going back into local communities, through grants of between £3,000 and £15,000. It is made up of money seized from criminals as Staffordshire Police continue to strip offenders of their assets.
Successful projects in all three funding streams will deliver what’s important to local people based on the four priorities set out in the Commissioner’s Safer, Fairer, United Communities Strategy – tackling the root causes of crime through early intervention, supporting victims and witnesses better, reducing reoffending and increasing public confidence.
