We are absolutely delighted to announce that we won the very first Awesome Foundation Glasgow grant of £500 to pilot the Braw Wee Traders project! The Awesome Foundation is a global community advancing the interest of awesome in the universe, $1000 at a time. Each fully autonomous chapter supports awesome projects through micro-grants, usually given out monthly. These micro-grants, $1000 or the local equivalent, come out of pockets of the chapter's "trustees" and are given on a no-strings-attached basis to people and groups working on awesome projects.
The project aims to support the regeneration of the Barras and Calton area through training and support of local people to develop their own retail businesses and become Barras traders, using the story of Maggie McIver (The Barras Founder) as inspiration. We will work with two local young women training them up to source/ or create great products, how to set up a market stall, brand and the marketing their businesses and general business admin and then support them open up their own stalls within the Barras Market. You can read more about it here on the Awesome Foundation website.
The project will be launched in January 2018, and will tie into the Rock Regen CIC ‘Be a Barras Trader’ project which is a partnership with Glasgow Furniture Collective and Glow Arts and supported by the Glasgow City Council Stalled Spaces Grants.
We are totally blown away that the trustees chose us from over 50 initial applications and the two other projects that were pitching their ideas at last nights event. This is an idea that has been bubbling away for the past 18 months, and receiving the validation from the panel that this is an awesome idea that they wanted to support has given us a huge confidence boost and the funds to finally pilot it. We can't wait to get started!
We'll be doing some further fundraising for the project in the near future, so watch this space!