Carolann McPhilimey

Carolann McPhilimey is one of the original the Project Officers for the Coalfield Community Landscape Partnership. These are her words, recorded at the end of project celebration in October 2025.

"I started with the CCLP in January 2020 while we were still in Covid.

My role was to look after a number of projects but Connecting Communities was the largest. The Cumnock History Group was another early one but I have been heavily involved in most of them.

It became apparent quite quickly that it was going to be difficult with all the Covid restrictions. At the first opportunity I obtained permission to get out and about into the community.

I started going for meetings outside in the countryside, getting to know people and letting them know who I am. I was trying to engage with everyone and understand how to bring their projects together.

One of the very first I looked at was the mountain bike project. The way it was positioned it wasn't going to work for us.

I went out with Elaine Stewart and we looked at other opportunities in other places to see how we could do it. We identified a site and started pursuing that but again it hit problems. We were told it wasn't going to be exciting enough, so we had to look again.

There were so many twists and turns, none of the projects have been straightforward. At the Lugar Heritage church when we lifted the floor there were more problems underneath. Elaine and I got together one night on the computer with a glass of wine trying to find them an extra £40k of funding. We were successful in securing that, allowing them to complete the project.

It has been exciting and I have really loved it. I classed all of the projects as my babies. I probably got more emotionally involved than I should have done. It is so heartwarming to see all of the communities succeed, all the planning coming to fruition.

I came up with the idea of the time capsule to capture the voices of all the people involved who may not be around in so many years time. I think their memory and all of their hard work should always be remembered. It is like another oral history project with blogs and videos captured.

The spin off projects were never part of the plan, introducing and connecting people is something I do naturally. I'm a born networker. I believe that when we work together we get things done better. Everyone has a different skill and bringing them together provides security.

Some of the spin off projects I came across were;

• Auchinleck recovery Group, ACDI. Janet wanted to form a social enterprise. Today you can see some of their work in the table decorations. I worked with them when Jenna from the Biosphere was looking for something for the Sense of Place project. She had been going to communities but was not getting much buy in. I'd been speaking to Natalie Carmichael of The Hive and something she told me struck a chord. She told me that people in recovery don't feel they belong anywhere any more and they don't have a voice.
  I spoke to Jenna and we decided to do a Sense of Place with them to give them a voice. That resulted in the videos that we have seen today. Speaking to the people involved they said it gave them new confidence and new skills. Some feel that could eventually join the workforce again.
  Building people's confidence and empowering them is really important to me.
• The health and wellbeing project I've seen that being advertised down in England now. Getting healthcare into rural communities is not easy and can be expensive. Getting to hospital appointments from a rural community can also be expensive, especially if you are on a zero hours contract and don't get paid if you have to take time off work.
  I wondered how bring health into communities. That's something I'll be doing again in my new role.
  I will be replicating the things we have learned because it has proven to be good work as people have benefitted from it. The feedback I've got has been tremendous so I'll be repeating that in Dumfries and Galloway.

The hope was that the CCLP would be continued. Because of budget constraints in the council and the length of time it has taken to release money through the nine community councils the money was not there to keep Colin and I in post.

My idea was that we could have worked on behalf of of the council and the 9CC to help the communities use the benefit money for strategic projects like the North Kyle Masterplan we were looking to bring community led tourism to the area.

I introduced them to the Press Pause Workshops which are linked to tourism. So many people have tourism pushed on them, I feel it is important for communities to have their own voices to prepare them and help understand what they thought was good in their communities. How can they use and enhance their heritage assets to create jobs for the young people.

We need to stop the migration of young people to towns and cities to hold them here where we need them, to create opportunities to make them want to stay.

We need to stem the migration and give them suitable housing at sensible prices. Jobs that pay a decent wage and decent access to healthcare. All these things are grassroots problems.

The way I look at the world now is planet-people-profit. All of the parts have to interlock. You can't take a slice of cake from the middle, it would collapse. We need to look at how to look after the planet with our people, to generate the profits to create a circular economy"