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Welcome to Mey Village Hall August 2008 News  Fundraising is very much in our minds at the moment as we look to buy the list of furnishings and equipment needed for the new hall. We decided to have a home-made sweet stall at the Mey Highland Games this year and raised £141, a very good total considering the weather was atrocious with horizontal rain all afternoon. Thanks to the ladies who made the sweets and the kind folks who held our stall down when it was about to blow away!!
We will be launching a Grand Raffle Draw to coincide with the opening of the hall. We are printing a thousand tickets with the first prize of £100. We have tremendous support from local business and there will be a great list of prizes. If you have any unwanted gifts or items that would make a suitable prize we would be very happy to accept them too.
 Construction work is continuing on site and there is something new to see every day. The roof tiles and fascias are going on and the first windows are in place. Last week Scottish and Southern Energy installed the new upgraded electricity supply.
We have submitted two funding applications recently and await the outcomes of both. We applied for help towards the cost of our new electricity connection from the Scottish Hydro-Electric Community Trust and hope to hear from them in October. We have also just submitted an application to Awards for All to help us purchase the furnishings and equipment we need so fingers crossed!!
 Now that work is progressing well on the building we are looking at promoting the facilities. We are working with the organisers of the Royal National MOD 2009 to hopefully bring some fundraising and fringe activities to our community. We have also been liaising with the North Highland College and they plan to run a series of Community Empowerment Training events in the spring.
In the next few days we hope to upload photographs of the hall so that our friends, particularly those in far flung places, can keep in touch with what is happening back home. Watch this space!!
Finally on a sadder note the committee lost one of it's long time supporters last month. Sandy Webster was an enthusiastic member coming along to every meeting even when his health was failing. We will miss him.
June 2008 News Work is progressing well on site and it’s now possible to see the basic outline of the various rooms on the ground floor. The under floor heating pipes have been laid this week and the concrete floor for the upstairs section has been put in place. Our contractor GMR Henderson has given a completion date of 27 October 2008. Photos of the building work as it progresses will be posted shortly in our new photo gallery. In May we were awarded a grant pf £9,615 by HICEC towards the cost of insulation and this brings the total funding we have secured to £682,169. At the moment the Hall Committee are fundraising to provide equipment for the new hall and are looking at ways to ensure the new building is used to its full potential. We want to hear from anyone who would like to use the hall to ensure we provide the right equipment and furnishings. We will shortly be sending a newsletter to every household and every group/club in the community to keep everyone posted on progress. We continue to meet on the last Wednesday of every month in the Scarfskerry Church Hall so please come along if you plan to use the new hall and have ideas on what type of equipment we should provide. March 2008 News Members of the committee recently visited Keiss hall to have a look around the new building. It was encouraging to see such a great facility and to get some good advice from a group who have completed a project similar to our own. Highlands and Islands Community Energy Company have awarded a grant of £26,900 towards the installation of our heat pump system. We’re really delighted with this funding and have a further application pending for assistance with our insulation costs. The heat pump will ensure our hall is always comfortably warm and will be much cheaper to run than any alternative system we could install. Below is a diagram showing the heat pump system but this is just an illustrative diagram and not a technical schematic.
Download the diagram here (pdf - 439kb). Building work continues on site with some of the steel work erected at the rear of the building. You can see some recent photographs in our gallery.
The equipment we had in the old hall was limited and in very poor condition. Over the coming months we will be fundraising to buy new chairs, tables, crockery etc. We held our AGM in January and currently have sixteen members on the committee. This is good news as the year ahead will be a busy one. Meetings take place on the last Wednesday of every month in Scarfskerry church hall. We’d be delighted to welcome new members so please come along if you’re interested. November 2007 Update The best news must surely be that work has finally started on site. Over the coming weeks things will begin to look very different as the old building is stripped back to its stone walls and the roof comes off completely. Our contractor GMR Henderson has started ground clearing and the new car parking area is taking shape. We will post photos in the gallery and keep you up to date. The ground source heat pump system is going to be a key part of the refurbishment. We have contacted other village hall committees who have one installed and they are making considerable savings on their heating costs and have a building that is constantly warm. We think this will be a very attractive feature in the new hall. At the moment we have secured £655,569 in funding. In addition to this we hope to receive grant aid on our heating system and are in the process of submitting an application to Highland and Islands Community Energy Company. We have been fundraising regularly this year and people have been genereous as always. Our fundraising link shows what we have been up to and we are already planning next year's events. Our meetings have been held in the Scarfskerry Church since the hall was closed in May. We will not be holding our regular monthly meeting in December as everyone is busy but in January we will begin again with our AGM. We are looking forward to 2008 which should be a very good year for our community.
February News
Just before Christmas four tenders were submitted for construction work on the new hall. They were all considerably above the estimate we had been working to and this put a big hole in our funding package. It also meant work could not begin on 1st February as predicted.
We had a shortfall of £189,000 to overcome and we set about achieving our target in two ways - by reducing the specification of the building and increasing the funding available. We have been able to make saving on the design of around £70,000 without compromising the facilities included in the hall. In addition to this we have been speaking to our main funders and are hopeful that they will increase their awards. The Queen Elizabeth Castle of Mey Trust has pledged a grant of £10,000 which is good news and we now seem to be back on track.
Our AGM will take place in the hall on Wednesday 21 February 2006 at 7.00pm. Our meetings have been very well attended during the past year and we hope the committee of seventeen members will continue to grow. We aim to establish a fundraising sub committee to increase fundraising locally so please come along if you'd like to get involved.
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