The Wee Gaitherin receives generous funding awards

We are delighted to announce that following becoming a Scottish Registered Charity in summer 2022, The Wee Gaitherin has been successful in an application for funding from The National Lottery Community Fund Scotland. This award, amounting to £10,000, is making it possible for us to improve and increase upon our activities both throughout The Wee Gaitherin Festival, taking place 10–12 August 2023, and to add some activities and resources that are going to help us to become more visible to people living in Stonehaven and the surrounding area, and also further afield. We hope that what we have planned will enable more people to get involved in enjoying our welcome to poetry for all, at every level of interest and experience. In addition, we were also delighted to receive a generous contribution of £3,526 funding from the Kincardine and Mearns Area Committee Budget 2023/24.

Following the feedback we received from the people who took part in The Wee Gaitherin 2022 – poets, and musicians, those who love listening to poems, and those dipping a toe into poetry for the first time – we were delighted to find that there was unanimous support for The Wee Gaitherin becoming an annual feature in Scotland’s cultural calendar. We are really grateful to all of you who expressed your support so wholeheartedly and for the ideas shared with us about how we could sustain and improve upon what we had achieved in our first two years. Based on some of the key features that recurred throughout this feedback, we applied for support to improve and increase our already well-subscribed local engagement programme; to improve our operations, including how we share information about events, and archive and share a record of these; and to increase the ways in which we celebrate Stonehaven and District’s wonderful location, cultural resources, and amenities - for local people and visitors too.

In order to meet these aims we are using this very welcome funding award to support our new website development, Pre-festival workshops and poetry events ‘Wee Words’, and the festival itself.