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On the 10 October at the Community Market, the exciting results of the Ilsington Shop Community Awards 2015 were announced. Seven organisations from the Parish applied for funds and we are happy to announce that EVERYONE was successful! The shop gave a total of £5110 to worthwhile causes.

1. £500 was given to the Friends of Ilsington School towards a collection of wooden toadstool-style seating stools for the school field.

2.£250 was given to the Friends of Simms View towards Christmas craft activities and a party, including transport to the event for the elderly and normally housebound locals.

3. £250 was given to the Ilsington Netball Club towards the purchase of a kit bag of equipment as well as affiliation fees.

4. £750 was given to Ilsington Preschool for a living willow dome installation (including materials and ground preparation).

5. £60 was given to the Ilsington Primary School Council for classroom recycling boxes.

6. £1800 was given to Ilsington Village Hall for a portable stage

7. £1500 was given to the 1st Liverton Scout Group towards the purchase of replacement equipment necessary for week-long camps (notably tents, benches and fridges).

All of this is only possible because of the wonderful volunteers who generously give their time to help out in our shop and because of the wonderful customers from far and wide who continue to visit our shop. Give yourselves a huge pat on the back. We couldn’t do this without you!

Ilsington Community Market

Saturday 10 October 2015

1 – 4pm at Ilsington Village Hall

Come and join us for a Harvest Market with a Difference!

The Community Market is now a regular event at the Village Hall enabling us to buy locally produced food and crafts……and all right on your doorstep!

A wide variety of stalls will be selling traditional and modern handmade crafts and gifts and locally produced meat, jams and honey.

This market has a harvest theme so come along and try your hand at making your own apple juice! We will have a traditional basket apple press available to turn your surplus apples into juice for drinking or making into cider. Please bring along a suitable container to carry your juice home in. Pasteurised apple juice will be available on the day so everyone can have a taste.

If you purchase something from any stall holder at the market, you will be entered into a FREE raffle (drawn at the market) with a chance to win a shop voucher or a bottle of fizz!

As usual the café offers a great place to catch up with friends and neighbours and enjoy delicious bacon baps, cakes and hot drinks.

The announcement of the 2015 Community Shop Award Beneficiaries will be made at the market at 3pm.

If you would like a stall at the market, please contact Su on 01364 661318.

Hope to see you all there!

On Saturday we are launching a new shop loyalty card for customers using the cafe: Buy five hot drinks and get a sixth free!

Emma will be handing out these new cards at the Community Market on Saturday 10 October at the Village Hall. Come along between 1pm and 4pm and collect a free stamp on the card to get you started as well as enjoying a traditional craft and local produce market.

Ilsington Community Market

Saturday 27 June 2015

1 – 4pm at Ilsington Village Hall

Come and join us for a Summer Market with a Difference!

The Community Market is now a regular event at the Village Hall enabling us to buy locally produced food and crafts……and all right on your doorstep!
This market is full of traditional and modern handmade crafts – perfect for gifts or for treating yourself.

NEW! This month there is a FREE competition open to all children. Create a MINIATURE GARDEN (no bigger than 20cm square!) and bring it along to the market for a chance to win the Ilsington Challenge Cup.

If you purchase something from Ilsington Village Shop in the two weeks before the market, remember to ask for your Community Loyalty Raffle Ticket. Hand it to any stall holder at the Market (excluding the café) when you buy something, and you will be entered into a FREE raffle (drawn at the market) with a chance to win a shop voucher or a bottle of fizz!

As usual the café offers a great place to catch up with friends and neighbours and enjoy delicious bacon baps, cakes and hot drinks.

A community table is available if you have a few surplus vegetables, jams or plants to sell. Just bring along your priced items and we will sell them for you!

If you would like a stall at the market, please contact Su on 01364 661318.

Hope to see you all there!

Ilsington Village Shop Association Limited would like to invite applications
for a share of this year’s fantastic amount of £5000!

Applications must be received on the official application form by Friday 24th July 2015.

The form and the selection criteria are on our website under Our Projects.

Awards will be made in October 2015.

What started as a simple idea from the Eden Project turned out to be a huge gathering of over 100 friends and neighbours who all came together to enjoy a BBQ lunch and a chat. The shop provided some yummy burgers whilst everyone else brought a salad or a pudding. What a lovely day! Thank you, Anne for all your hard work.

Kevin Carr is due to finish his incredible round the world run this evening at the Haytor top carpark at approximately 6.30pm. Because we all want to be there to welcome our local barman home like a true hero, the shop will be closed from 5pm to 6pm this evening.

For more information and to make a donation, please go here:

http://hardwayround.com/

See you all later!

Emma was interviewed by BBC Radio Devon on the subject of Community Spirit, but the show is only available to listen to on line for a short time. With that in mind, please find below a transcript of her interview with Bill Buckley:

Interview transcript BBC Radio Devon 27 Feb 2015 with Bill Buckley.

Bill: Emma’s on the line now from Haytor. Hello Emma.
Emma: Hi.
B: I was asking if there was anybody out there who’s involved in one of these sorts of schemes already and if so, how it’s running, and you’re involved in a community shop. Yes?
E: Yes, that’s right. I manage a community shop in Ilsington just on the edge of Dartmoor.
B: Now if you’re the manager of it, is that a paid job?
E: Yes it is. I’m paid and then I have an assistant manager who’s paid aswell.
B: And then underneath them you have the volunteers?
E: That’s right. We’ve got have over 50 volunteers that help run the shop.
B: Wow! Over 50?
E: Yes.
B: Gosh! How long has that been going on and how easy or difficult was it to build up this team?
E: It’s been going 2 and a half years. Actually we’ve been surprised that we’ve never had a problem and we’ve never had to shut the shop because we couldn’t get someone to run it for us.
B: Wow!
E: Which is really brilliant. We have really long opening hours as well, from 8 in the morning to 7.30 in the evening. But that’s great because it means that you have the retirees and people that are free during the day, mums that work in the mornings and then in the evenings, people that go to work actually come in and then help in the shop in the evenings as well.
B: So some of your volunteers are even working mums? Those people that we think do not have time to put their makeup on let alone work in a shop?
E: Yes and people come in with their children at the weekend. The kids help behind the till too so it’s a really lovely thing. It’s not just retirees helping out at all.
B: At the beginning, how did you find these people?
E: Well it took 4 years to fund raise to actually get the shop open. Our shop in the village shut and then over the 4 years there was lots of involvement fund raising and so on from a lot of people. So we’ve got 200 shareholders and a lot of those people actually said that they would volunteer. We’ve had a few people that drop out, but then you get other people that see that actually it’s really good fun and will come along…
B: Yeah, you’ve taken the words out of my mouth. I was going to ask you about that because there is a school of thought that to start with everybody’s gung-ho, and it’s bringing the village together and then once it gets started, whatever it is, you know, putting salt on the roads or cleaning the loos, or running the shop, it gradually comes down to 3 or 4 people who have to do it all the time. Other people promise to come in but they don’t turn up! But you haven’t had many problems like that?
E: No. I mean we’ve had a few people that decide that actually it’s not for them, but there’s always people moving into the village and so on and we always try and persuade them that actually it’s a great way to get to know people and we have people that don’t know anybody that come in and actually realise that if they come in and help for perhaps a couple of hours a week they’ll meet so many new people.
B: Right. Now what about the cost of all this? Because people say that with supermarkets, the reason that they’re successful of course is that they are huge and they’ve got the economy of scale they can buy in very cheaply.
E: Yes.
B: But of course you haven’t got to pay staff like they have so does that level up the playing field a bit?
E: It helps hugely. So if you go into some convenience shops they can be really expensive.
B: Yes.
E: But actually for us, because we don’t have all those overheads and …..we don’t have to pay rates either and all that really helps us so that actually the stock that we sell is quite competitive.
B: Right.
E: If you’re bulk buying huge amounts then it’s still cheaper to go to the supermarkets but for a lot of people that are just a couple….We have a lot of people who just come in and do their whole weekly shop with us.
B: Gosh! And you’re a big enough shop to stock a big enough range that it will do for a big weekly shop. It must be quite a big shop that you’ve got there?
E: It’s actually really small – it’s 500 square feet.
B: How do you get everything that you could possibly want into a little space?
E: It’s squashed in!
B: Must be!
E: I am an expert a squeezing stuff in. People are like:”No, not more new lines! And I’m like: “Yeah, we can get some more in there and if we move this around, we can fit some more in there!” So there’s always new stock in which keeps people coming in to see what interesting stuff we have got coming in.
B: And why hadn’t it worked as a commercial venture? Was it the prices or was it not putting a bit of everything in there? Or what, do you know?
E: It’s just it’s really hard work to run a shop on your own. I mean I’ve got 50 people that can help me and that’s brilliant. The idea of doing it all on my own, 7 days a week, working 8 to 7 would just be such a strain on one or two people. Whereas we have a committee as well that do a lot of the paperwork, so it just really makes a difference, I think.
B: Now because of this, has this lead on to people in your patch doing all these other things, or maybe do you think they’d consider doing these other things we have talked about – gritting the roads, filling in potholes, and even dare I say, cleaning the toilets?
E: I think you would get more interest because I think it has made a difference as far as people feeling like they’re part of the community. The more people you know in the area, so certainly where we’ve got some elderly people that have been ill and things like that, actually people would come out of the woodwork and say “Oh I can go and get their shopping for them or I’ll go and help take them to the doctors”. Yeah, you just get much more of that feeling that people want to work together.
B: So we shouldn’t see this as an imposition and we shouldn’t see this as governments failing us and making us do things for ourselves, we should see it as an opportunity.
E: Absolutely. Yes.
B: Thank you very much, lovely to talk to you. There we are, there’s Emma who manages a community shop in Haytor. There is an upside to us having to do it ourselves, it would appear.