Applications are now being accepted for the council’s Supporting Communities Fund.

This fund allows for local groups and organisations to apply for up to £2,500 to run events or deliver services.

In recent years this has been used to support events such as the Helensburgh Highland Games and musical events.

There have also been successful bids from organisations such as Riding for the Disabled and Helensburgh and Lomond Autism to help with their costs delivering support to local people.

In the past, the final decision as to which groups received their money (and how much) was down to the councillors in the Helensburgh and Lomond Area Committee to decide.

This year a different approach has been taken and which groups are successful in their bid will be in the hands of all local people.

“Participatory Budgeting” is a system which is in use in quite a number of places now, and the idea is that local people make the decisions about how to best use funding available.

The council ran a pilot scheme last year to allocate Gaelic funding and this year it will now be used for the Supporting Communities Fund.

The ultimate aim is to build up the use of this kind of decision-making so that local people are involved in making some of the really big financial decisions rather than just responding to consultations.

One difficulty in Argyll and Bute is the geography, which makes it very difficult to bring people together into a single location.

Even in Helensburgh and Lomond there would be time and costs involved in people coming from Cove or Arrochar or Portincaple into Helensburgh, so instead online voting will be used.

Full information is available on the www.abpb.co.uk website.

I would encourage anyone interested in applying for funding to have a look at this, but it will also be of interest to anyone who wants the chance to vote in the spring.

One of the groups who received funding in the last funding round was the Welcome In – a support group for those moving on from addiction.

I finally had the chance to drop in and visit one of their sessions a few weeks ago and it was great to see the commitment and effort made by volunteers to turn a small amount of funding into a service making a real change in people’s lives.