Page 76 - br-june-2020

June 2020 June 2020
KINGSBERE QUILTERS
What do quilters do in a lockdown? Well they don’t
quit quilting!
Like many other groups in the village we have now
closed down temporarily. To date we have now
missed two meetings and a workshop. Fortunately
we all received instructions for our next project by
email.
The project was to produce the Bargello squares.
(Bargello is normally associated with Florentine
embroidery, but has been adapted to patchwork.
Sewing strips of fabric together and cutting and
reforming them to produce waves of colour) Lesson
over!!
Instead of our normal show and tell session in the
group meeting we have been able to do this by
email as well. However it is definitely not the same
as meeting your fellow members and sharing ideas
and news, as you will all know.
Many of our members have been busy making
items for the NHS and similar organisations. These
have included masks, aprons, scrubs and laundry
bags. Also a few of the members who live in the
village are working on producing a colourful piece
for the Children’s Corner in the Church.
In the past we have enjoyed joining the flower
arrangers in presenting events in the Church to raise
funds for both the Church and local charities. It will
be so nice when we can all do that again.
We all look forward to life returning to a new form of
normal when we can return to our groups and
organisations.
To see some of these wonderful works, in glorious
technicolour, log on to the village website and click
the link at the top - June Parish Magazine.
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which takes place at the
moment. There will be a
g u i d a n c e d o c u m e n t
available for all staff
affected shortly. We are not
expecting or wanting huge
numbers of staff to return to
the offices at this stage.
Homelessness and
rough sleepers
Since the start of the
outbreak, our housing teams have helped 28 rough sleepers from across the
county into accommodation – this has, and continues to be, challenging and we
are operating as a multi-agency response to the situations this is creating on a
daily basis. In addition, the team have also housed more than 120 homeless
households in temporary accommodation and will continue to support these
people into more permanent accommodation as the lockdown restrictions ease.
Business Grants
As of the middle of May Dorset Council made 7,462 grant payments to businesses
in the Dorset Council area totalling £89m. Dorset Council have paid 92% of the
grant claims we have received – meaning at the time of writing we have 629 that
are either currently approved and awaiting the next payment run, or undergoing
validation or they have just landed! And we have received a moderate but
noticeable increase in the number of claims since last week’s letters to businesses
who had not yet made a claim.
The national data recently released shows that only 7 councils out of 314 have
made more payments than us and only 6 of the 314 have distributed more money
to their local businesses than us so far. We have received a total of 1,160 claims
that did not pass our validation/verification processes, so while we might have
been anxious about processing volumes in the early days, this figure in particular
proves that we were right not to relax our verification criteria and proceed with the
appropriate validation measures in place. We are also receiving some very
positive – and very welcome - feedback from businesses that are grateful for the
funding and the way we have supported them.
Minerals Plan
In all the furore you may have missed the Minerals Site plan progress which has
been 5 years in the making. The Plans are all fully adopted now, and we are
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