WELCOME TO THE WEST END MORECAMBE BIG LOCAL (WEM)
West End Morecambe – Big Local (WEM for short) is a resident-led community partnership working to help improve the West End area of Morecambe through tackling issues which affect the area, and working with other partners to find new solutions. We are one of 150 similar partnerships across the country who together make up the Big Local programme, which is run by an organisation called Local Trust
The West End is a close and lively community that looks out on one of the world’s most beautiful landscapes. However, it also faces significant challenges related to economic and social deprivation. As a community, we live with these challenges every day, and in doing so are best placed when it comes to contributing to the ambition of making things better.
WEM was awarded a million pounds over ten years (around £100,000 per year) and charged with spending that through an Action Plan drawn up by local people. Our current Action Plan is for three years and was agreed in the summer of 2022. We are not a charity, nor do we have a bank account. We are accountable to Local Trust who agree our budget and we work with Lancaster District CVS, who administer the funds.
Our work is shaped through local knowledge, and we encourage new ideas and new ways of working collectively. This brings its own challenges when there are so many different opinions about what needs doing and how to do it. While WEM is not a magic pill, the funding helps tackle the issues our community faces and helps make small but positive differences. By focusing on local issues through our Action Plan we can build a strategy for working together with the community to make the West End a better place to live.
WEM has had its ups and downs and learned the hard way about some of the challenges of enabling a community to work together. In doing so we have gone through lots of changes, the biggest being a move from grant giving to commissioning work. That process has taken time, but it has also allowed us to really focus now on what works and to have the confidence to deliver it.
Here you can find out more about West End Morecambe Big Local, and the work we do, and keep up to date by joining our mailing list.
