Throughout 2018, Our Island partnered with event organisers and community groups to work to enhance and expand the range of activities, events and projects available to residents throughout 2018.

Through the ’Our Island’ grant funding stream, almost £75,000 was allocated to 45 projects.

Partners included festivals, workshops, competitions and exhibitions, and 2019 will see many of these projects either come to fruition or return for the New Year.

Funding up to £6,000 was available to those whose applications demonstrated how their projects worked to improve our quality of life, strengthened our national pride and engendered stronger partnerships.

We caught up with two of our partners to see what impact the funding has had and what they have planned in 2019.

Chris Gregory is well known for his desire to make the Isle of Man a place where all children have access to great play facilities on their doorstep.

His charity, Isle of Play, received funding from Year of Our Island to help develop an adventure playground at Ballalaughton Park in Douglas. Chris hopes that the project will give young people to experience a different kind of play.

’This will be the first Playground of its kind on the Isle of Man and we hope that it will help to cultivate thousands of rich memories and demonstrate the transformative power of play in developing a community for the better,’ said Chris

The playground is set to open in spring and you can keep up to date with its progress at isleofplay.im

Event organiser Dave McLean partnered with Our Island during the celebration of festivals in September for a weekend event in Peel, which aimed to highlight our island’s diversity and culture.

’Our Island: Our World’ featured local and international artists as well as a world food and craft village.

After the success of last year’s festival, plans are already well underway for this year which will take place as a result of the support received during 2018.

’We really enjoyed organising Our Island: Our World in association with Year of Our Island, and received loads of positive feedback, with many people asking if we would do it again in 2019,’ said Dave.

This year’s festival will take place on Friday and Saturday, August 30 and 31 and tickets will be available from centenarycentre.com in the coming months.

We’ll be speaking to more of our partners over the next three months to find out how being part of Year of Our Island benefited them, so be sure to follow our weekly article, as well as our social media, for more information.

by the Year of Our Island project team

www.ourisland.im