At last: our new website is here and really starting to take shape. It's been a long time coming and whilst not perfect, we are delighted to have shaken off the slightly dated image of our black and red mantle and started populating something which we hope will be of value to our Harris community and beyond.
Although our offices in West Tarbert remain closed under the ongoing work-from-home guidelines issued by our Scottish Government (SG), we can confirm that HVS have been anything but dormant during the Covid-19 crisis.
A few weeks prior to the initial lockdown, the new Development Manager - yours truly - was introduced to the staff and Board of HVS only for us all to then be isolated, working virtually whilst trying to support the local and national pandemic response. Since then, our staff team and board have grown with the addition of a Community Project Officer 3 days a week and the recruitment of three new Directors, as well as retaining the original Board members.
The Project list has morphed and adapted with these changing times and we find ourselves supporting even more of our Member organisations as well as administering the Western Isles Lifestyle Lottery and successfully applying for and receiving some Crown Estates and Western Isles Development Trust awards towards new impactful ideas.
The community have been fantastic in supporting HVS initiatives, prior and new and during the pandemic we received additional funding from The Robertson Trust, TSI resilience Funding, The Catherine M. MacLeod (Harris), The Harris Tweed Shop, North Harris Trust as well as receiving in-kind and discounted support from Norserv, the local Post Office amongst others. I will of course endeavour to publish a full roll of thanks on behalf of HVS but for this, our first blog post, I will trust that our readers will cut me some slack as is the parlance of our time and also keep me right for future.
So, we hope that you are pleased to see the HVS website updated and moving on; trying to incorporate both useful and the required content as well as creating an ongoing conduit for interacting with our island residents and wider third sector communities. We will continue to publish updates in our Member bulletins and of course, in De Tha Dol? and if you have any useful ideas for content, links and formats, your team at HVS would be delighted to hear from you!
Please please do test all our links and click throughs: we did not receive any additional funding towards the development of this website and the content and layout have been directed by our own team with the creative direction & support of the very lovely & patient Cat Campbell at Hebrides design and ongoing background tech wizardry of Tech-mobile in Stornoway. Thanks again for reading this far, Carolyn
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