Changing Ireland
New board takes charge of ‘Changing Ireland’
news
New Programme contacts database
A new voluntary board of directors has taken charge of ‘Changing Ireland’ which is now a stand-alone company in its own right. It is registered with the companies office as Changing Ireland Community Media Limited and an application is currently being processed with regard to providing the company with charitable status. The new chairperson of ‘Changing Ireland’ is Gearoid Fitzgibbon. He has written reports for the magazine for the past five years and is employed as a community development worker with North Tipperary LEADER Partnership. Gearoid is joined on the board by Breda Lymer of West Training, journalist Jim O’Brien, adult education worker Ellen Duffy and Mahon CDP co-ordinator Viv Sadd. ‘Changing Ireland’ has a provisional budget allocation of €118,000 for 2011. The company employs two staff, an editor and a part-time administrator. The change of management comes after nearly a decade of successful management under the Community Development Network Moyross Ltd which has now become part of the new Limerick City CDP.
You can now contact anyone nationwide in the Local and Community Development Programme (LCDP) through a national contacts database ‘Changing Ireland’ has compiled the contacts database of staff and voluntary board members throughout the Programme and it is available through a link on our website, changingireland.ie It doesn’t matter who you’re looking for – we’ve them listed: LCDP staff working with youth, jobs clubs, mediation, finance, jobs schemes, etc. Note: If your Local Development Company’s listing is incomplete please fill out the form on our website homepage and return it to us by email. Our older database which includes CDPs that have amalgamated with Local Development Companies (or are in the process of doing so) remains accessible, again via our website.
LCDP interactive map in production
Our website will shortly feature an interactive map for the Local and Community Development Programme (LCDP) with links to each of the 52 Local Development Companies and other community organisations involved in the Programme. The plan is that every organisation’s website will be accessible through a link on the map.
FOR THE RECORD: We wrote Celtic Tiger’s epitaph… IN 2006 For the record, ‘Changing Ireland’s cartoon cover of Autumn 2006 featured a dead ‘Celtic Tiger’ with a ‘Super-Volunteer’ standing over the corpse surveying a scene of urban chaos, heroin addiction, alcoholism, crime, dereliction, suicide and emigration. The cover was designed to point to the superhuman struggle required by volunteers in the face of near socio-economic collapse in our poorer communities. The magazine cover took on added meaning one week after cartoonist Austin Creaven completed his work when children sitting in
Permanent staff employed by Fas fell by 10% in past 2 years
8.
a parked car in Moyross were petrol-bombed. However, the cover was intended to be generic and the area depicted could have been any of a number of disadvantaged areas. The greater pity is that our warning about the ‘Celtic Tiger’s demise wasn’t listened to, no more than were warnings from the small number of smart economists at the time. Join us on our Facebook page (there’s a link on the homepage of www.changingireland.ie) and see which of our 35 covers to date is your personal favourite.