2 September 2005
£40,000 TO GLEN COMMUNITY GROUP
The Department for Social Development is helping to protect vital community services in West Belfast by providing £40,000 to Glen Community Group.
The money will be used to safeguard the manager's position, which is pivotal to the successful running of the Glen Community Complex. Set up 20 years ago to tackle joyriding and other forms of anti-social behaviour, it provides counselling, education, training, childcare and amateur boxing to the residents of Lenadoon.
Minister for Social Development, David Hanson said: "One of the main goals of our Neighbourhood Renewal Strategy is to ensure that people living in areas such as Lenadoon have access to the best possible services and opportunities to improve their prospects.
"Glen Community Complex is a focal point for local people of all ages. It offers a wide range of programmes to help people get the skills they need to get on in life.
"I understand that it will also be home to the emerging Lenadoon Neighbourhood Partnership which will be working to develop a strategy, setting out the future for the area, identifying local priorities and the action that will be taken."
The Neighbourhood Renewal Strategy 'People and Place' was published in June 2003 to close the gap between the quality of life for people in the most deprived neighbourhoods and the rest of society.
NOTES TO EDITORS:
1. The Neighbourhood Renewal Strategy has four interlinking strategic objectives:
2. In July 2004, following lengthy consultation, the then Minister for Social Development, John Spellar, announced the 32 areas of greatest disadvantage across Northern Ireland. £56 million has been set aside over the next three years for their regeneration.
- Community Renewal - to develop confident communities that are able and committed to improving the quality of life in their areas.
- Economic Renewal - to develop economic activity in the most deprived neighbourhoods and connect them to the wider urban economy.
- Social Renewal - to improve social conditions for the people who live in the most deprived neighbourhoods through better co-ordinated public services and the creation of safer environments.
- Physical Renewal - to help create attractive, safe and sustainable environments in the most deprived neighbourhoods.
3. Each area will have a Neighbourhood Partnership that brings together at a local level government, business and the community and voluntary sectors so that different initiatives and services support each other and work together to close the gap between deprived areas and the rest of society.
4. For media enquiries please contact Dara Cosgrove on 028 9082 9078.
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