Scarecrow
Festival
The
Scarecrow Festival Committee, wish everyone a Merry Christmas and Best Wishes
for the New Year.
Money Raised
Several
people have asked what happens to the money raised at the Scarecrow Festival,
so here is an explanation.
The
festival this year was, as most people know, organised by a new committee
comprising, Paul and Chris Chadford, Lisa Woods, Sandra Ericson, Gerry Hallam, Gareth
Jones and Paul Leadbetter with Steve and Barbara Lowe, offering their excellent
support also.
The
aim of the committee is to host a community event at which the organisations in
the village can raise funds for their own causes.
Starting
with no funds we were grateful of a £100 donation from Ann Bishop. The Church,
School, Pre-School, Uniformed Groups, Friends of the Old School, Holidays for
Kids and the Football Club donated £50 each, as start-up funds for the festival
(£350). Other income came from a grant from Chorley Community Housing
(£396.36), selling of advertising space in the programme (£650), and sales of
the programme (£833.35 – not sure how that happened when they were £2 each!) making
the total income £2,329.71. Expenditure totalled £1,023.21 covering public
liability insurance, programme printing, advertising and trophies, leaving a
surplus of £1,306.50.
The
surplus from this year will be held in reserve, to ensure there are sufficient
funds to run the event again next year, even if everything goes wrong and there
is no income. If the amount of reserve rises to above that required to run the
event for three years, then the surplus from that will be split equally between
the Church, School, Pre-School, Uniformed Groups, Friends of the Old School,
Holidays for Kids and the Football Club as the organisations who provided
initial start-up funds.
What
is important is to recognise that the committee exists to facilitate the event,
allowing organisations to raise their own funds for their own charities and
good causes. Money raised at the Scarecrow Festival will be included within the
accounts of those organisations, not in the Scarecrow Festival accounts. Having
talked with some of the organisations that were involved, it is thought total
income over the weekend exceeded £8,000. The school, for example, have said
that it was their most successful Scarecrow Festival, in terms of fundraising,
for several years.
Best Scarecrow
Congratulations
go to the Ronfell Family, of Lichen Close, with their “Up” Scarecrow which won
the Best Scarecrow Competition, as voted for by the children as they walked
around the village. Second place went to Willy Wonka by the Hutchinson Family
of Cherry Tree Close and Bertie Basset by John and Sue Ashton of Sharratts Path
came in third.
2015
The
2015 festival is on Saturday and Sunday 12 and 13 September, this may, or may
not, extend to the Friday, plans are in their infancy. What is certain is that
the 2015 Festival will build on the success of the festival in 2014 and
hopefully the sun will shine again.
We
do need any organisations who are going to be raising funds over the Scarecrow
Festival weekend to attend meetings when they can, all the meetings are open to
anyone and are held on the second Monday of each month at 7:30pm in the Dog and
Partridge. The reason we want people to attend these meetings is to allow
events to be promoted in the programme and ideally co-ordinated so as not to
clash, for example this year there was an organ recital at the Church and a dog
agility display at the Football Club, both taking place at the same time. If
events were co-ordinated it could result in a natural tour of the village
potentially allowing more people to see what we have to offer.
Most
of all we need people to create and display Scarecrows.
I
can be contacted by telephone (07926 089450) if anyone wants to talk about the
Scarecrow Festival, e-mail to chair.scarecrow@gmail.com or
follow us on twitter @scarethecrows or Facebook “Charnock Richard Scarecrow
Festival Official”.
Paul
Leadbetter
