You may have noticed a ‘Donate’ button on the website and wondered where the money goes after you have made a donation. The centre is dependent on grants and donations to provide services for the local community. One of the main benefits to the community and further afield is our trip boat ‘Spirit’. We try and generate a surplus using our trip boat which supplements our community projects such as pottery, art and other programmes, as well as more mundane things that allow the centre to run such as heating, lighting and the other everyday bills incurred.
We need to train people to crew and skipper Spirit, this involves training a crew member to NCBA level that takes a minimum of six weeks plus another six weeks and a two day away assessment to train a skipper. All this is made possible by using our training narrowboat known as as Narroway. Like anything else used for training the boat takes it fair share of depreciation and the odd loss of paint here and there (learners sometimes get it wrong when mooring). After a few years of these courses Narroway is in need of a refit and as she doesn’t generate any income we are now looking for funding to refurbish her. This will allow us to train more people, advertise the centre and have the knock on effect of more crew and skippers, more trips on Spirit, more income for the centre and ultimately more benefit to the community.
Please donate what you can afford.
Many thanks
Stuart Ellis, Treasurer.