A real community effort in the past few months

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Dear supporter,

I realise it’s been a while since I last wrote to you, but I wanted to keep you in the loop about the latest developments at West Leeds Dispatch.

It’s certainly been a busy time! The latest print edition hit the streets a couple of weeks ago. We had 27 different people contributing words and/or photos to the paper, and that’s not including the small army of volunteers who also help to drop the paper off at the myriad of community facilities/businesses across West Leeds. A huge thanks to everyone who contributed.

The work of our community reporters over the past few months in particular has been brilliant, contributing more than 100 articles on a variety of different topics.

And we have, of course, kept our eyes firmly on issues affecting the community, such as the defective swing bridge in Rodley, the TV Harrison campaign in Wortley, the regeneration of Armley Town Street, the future of Pudsey Civic Hall and Little Owls nurseries, local and national elections, shining a light on planning decisions and development, licensing - the list goes on! I’ve always been conscious of the fact that democracy dies in darkness and we do our best to shine a light on things.

We also ran our latest community reporter training course at our community newsroom at Bramley Lawn Social Centre, as well as running a community news cafe at Kirkstall Forge in early May. We also have an open newsroom on Thursdays, 5-7pm where people can attend for a friendly cuppa, meet the editor - maybe you have a story you think we should be covering? Sessions restart from next week.

Sadly our three-year funding from the National Lottery ended on 31 May. We have submitted a new bid for a further three years, so fingers (and everything else) crossed for that. We should find out whether we have been successful or not in about five months.

In the meantime, we will continue to do what we do best - connect our readers to local community groups, activities, achievements and positive news stories as well as connecting people to local democracy.

After today I’m heading away on a short break for a couple of days - my first break since Christmas, so I’m looking forward to it! I will be back on Friday evening.

Thanks for your ongoing support of community led media in West Leeds. We couldn’t do it without you.