Two of Scotland’s top chefs have joined a campaign to save an acclaimed Edinburgh community health scheme threatened by cuts. Martin Wishart and Tom Kitchin have backed a crowdfunding campaign which aims to raise £50,000 to keep the doors open at Pilton Community Health Project.
The project has provided support to vulnerable people across north Edinburgh, including some of Scotland’s most deprived areas for 35 years. But it faces having to close next month after Edinburgh’s health and social care body withdrew funding.
The Integration Joint Board (IJB) told the project in December that its funding would not be removed. But the decision has been greeted with bafflement by many in the north of Edinburgh who say the service’s blend of drop-in mental health support, support for victims of domestic abuse, childcare, cookery classes and art workshops is invaluable. Tom Kitchin and Martin Wishart said : “PCHP plays a really important role in ensuring everyone can access and cook healthy, nutritious meals. It’s vital that these and other services continue.”
The campaign says £50,000 will allow the project to run a much-reduced service for a year, but crucially will keep the doors open while longer-term funding is sought.
A spokeswoman for the PCHP said Edinburgh’ s IJB had also cut funding for six other charities in the north of the city “The short notice mean few will survive and it’s the people living in the most deprived areas of Edinburgh that will pay the price,” she said.
Edinburgh IJB says 152 grant applications for funding were received covering the next three financial years, totalling £31million, but it only had 14.1 million available to spend.
campaign website: www.savepchp.com
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here