Small Grants Fund Awards
The Working for Waders project is excited to announce that thirteen projects will receive support from the 2021 Small Grants Fund. The grants will fund a range of projects from predator control and rush management to the establishment of collaborative farm clusters from Ayrshire to Aberdeenshire.
The Small Grants Fund was set up as part of the Working for Waders project in 2020 in a bid to protect important and declining species like lapwings and curlews in Scotland. In the first year, applicants could bid for funding up to £1000 to carry out small projects like making wader scrapes and improving signage to reduce disturbance. After a successful first year, the fund was expanded in 2021 to a maximum of £3000, and more than forty applications were received during the summer from farmers, gamekeepers and land managers across Scotland.
Speaking about the Small Grants Fund, Patrick Laurie of Working for Waders explained that “nobody expects small grants like these to singlehandedly reverse the worrying decline of waders in Scotland, but they can be an extremely useful tool to help us all learn more about practical conservation issues. Making wader scrapes or managing rushes to create better breeding habitats might make a big impact at the level of a single farm or field, but the real advantage is in working with a range of partners and understanding how small projects add value to bigger ones”.
“The move to a £3000 threshold has allowed several applicants to make proposals to fund projects which include predator control. We all understand that predator control can be a really important part of wader conservation, and 2021’s enlarged Small Grants Fund allows us to explore ways to fund this kind of work, which is often hard to measure or quantify in financial terms. We’re looking forward to working with the successful applicants to find out more about how this kind of conservation can be funded”.
More information about the successful applicants will soon be available. Working for Waders is a collaborative project which involves a range of conservation and land management organisations in Scotland, working alongside a number of individual farmers, birders and ecologists to reverse the decline of wading birds.