Community shop proving a life line for Morebattle villagers thanks to £5,000 grant

Morebattle’s community-owned village shop is stepping up the services provided by staff and volunteers to ensure that no villagers go short of food and other essentials during the Coronavirus lockdown.
Morebattle Community Shop volunteers, photographed before social distancing restrictions were introduced.Morebattle Community Shop volunteers, photographed before social distancing restrictions were introduced.
Morebattle Community Shop volunteers, photographed before social distancing restrictions were introduced.

It’s been given a £5,000 emergency grant to allow it to stock its shelves and but in extra stock of the likes of antibacterial hand gel and cleaning products, from the Scottish Land Trust charity.

Within hours of the lockdown being announced on Monday, March 23, Morebattle Community Shop had organised delivery services so that the most vulnerable people in their neighbourhoods and those who were self-isolating could phone in their orders and have groceries dropped on their doorsteps.

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Six weeks on staff and volunteers there are working long hours manning the phones, making up orders, coordinating deliveries and taking food to people who need it, while also putting restrictions on the number of customers allowed in the Main Street building at any time.

The shop provides a lifeline for elderly people and those affected by reduced bus travel during the lockdown, and this emergency grant has been instrumental in helping with the shop’s additional running costs during the crisis.

Community shop board member Rachael Thomson said: “We have an elderly population and many of our volunteers are themselves over 70 so those who can work are doing much longer hours - up to 40 hours-a-week in the case of one volunteer - in order to keep this vital service going.

“Normally at this time of the year we would be very busy with walkers on the St Cuthbert’s Way so while we have lost that trade, more local people have turned to the village shop during the crisis. Meanwhile we have had to work with different stockists, which has proved to be more expensive, and we are now providing hand sanitiser gel for staff and volunteers, so the £5,000 emergency grant which we have received from the Scottish Land Fund for additional staffing costs, volunteer expenses and has been really welcome.

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“In fact, if it hadn’t been for the £143,000 which the Scottish Land Fund gave us in 2018, this shop would probably have closed and that would have been a disaster for people in this area during this difficult time.”

A community takeover of the shop in August 2018 was made possible thanks in-part to a £148,000 grant from the Scottish Land fund amid fears that the village amenity could have been lost after shop owner and retired teacher Ann Brown announced her plans to sell the shop after seven years.