Funding- Well amazingly, after one year of crowdfunding we actually overfunded. We also concluded our cash collections which for the entire year resulted in Morrisons £626, Home Bargains £735 and the Esso petrol station £61 from their customer’s collections. We know so many countless people were involved in this which is very humbling, for which we are enormously grateful. SMW Update - we had been planning to deliver the final three components of the project in April but unfortunately we have been hampered by the national restrictions and have reluctantly made the decision to postpone the installation of the rhinoceros sculpture, noticeboard, and wildflower turf. It was really frustrating to be so close, we had actually ordered the delivery of the wildflower turf for the 2.4.20! Consequently, the wildflower turf will be re-ordered for September/October when the turf will not be exposed to excessively dry or frosty weather. Looking back over the last two record-breaking months of dry weather and sunshine, we were perhaps fortunate in not putting down the wildflower turf! The noticeboard and rhinoceros will be installed once we obtain further information from the foundry manufactures and the sign company. However, we expect to have this installed within the year. We understand that the foundry staff returned to work only this week. We expected the foundry to be focusing on their profitable work to enable them to return to a stable footing, but the director is keen to deliver this project and will provide an update next week. Fortunately, we were able to collect nine huge bin bags of plastic bottle tops from the three fantastic primary schools (Northway, Lydiate, and St Andrews). The competition between the classes in each of the primary school sounded brilliant, particularly the youngest class of proud victorious children who were the winners at their school in Lydiate Primary ('Top Class'!). Our hope is that the children can all attend the eventual unveiling and insert the bottle tops they collected, and get a real sense of ownership for their fantastic engagement. With regard to anyone else who is collecting bottle tops, I would be very grateful if you could continue collecting and saving them yourselves, until the sculpture is available. Do not worry if we have too many bottle tops as we may consider making a community mosaic picture! The Next Project 2020 – at Woodend/Bobby’s Wood, near the junction of Liverpool Road South and Northway, has now been independently verified and is currently in the crowdfunding stage and although it feels like an ambitious mountain to climb between April and the end of October, we have been really encouraged by the achievement of obtaining 56% of our target fund already mainly through in-kind offers of support. More information and how to support this project can be found at www.spacehive.com/woodend Finally, during the current lockdown period people may have noticed that whilst the bulbs were naturally dying down the surrounding grassed areas were not being maintained as normal resulting in some periods of long grass/weeds. Whilst recognising that the normal maintenance teams were unable to work we cut the grass to 3 times ourselves. We also discovered that the landowners subcontractors had changed from Marshalls to Space Care who despite their perfect maintenance of the grassed areas around Morrisons they were unaware that their responsibilities extended along Stafford Morton Way, which they remedied incredibly promptly to a very good standard. During the drought period we supported the new trees with regular watering (some on a daily basis) out of the 170 next wildlife friendly hedging trees we may have lost 10, that we will replace in November. The local canal became a helpful reservoir for our watering cans! The picture was taken by Roy Greason (professional photographer and co-founder member of our group), of SMW, for a new Maghull website at www.maghullcommunityweb.co.uk
