THE GOODWILL FUND
est. 2022. A community grant scheme supporting the culture, history and society of Ross Shire.
In early 2023, we distributed a total of just over £10,000. This has gone towards; supporting local children’s educational needs which are not being met by other organisations, support for cultural and heritage organisations to enhance an understanding of the culture, history and society of Ross Shire, and also to help support business development in the area.
We hope that this injection of new funds will help to support and motivate young people to achieve their full potential, help make the benefits of local culture and history more widely accessible and meaningful, and also promote sustainable business development that will, in turn, benefit the local community.
There has been a lot of hard work in the background. The Board and the Members saw the GoodWill Fund as a priority in 2021. Last year The GoodWill Fund committee of volunteers was set up to oversee and manage the fund and have worked with the team at GlenWyvis to make this a reality.
“We have been able to achieve this earlier than expected due to the success of our first whisky release in 2021 and the continuing strong sales of our highland single malt whisky and our GoodWill Gin, with 5% of all online sales going into the GoodWill Fund.
We are planning to have a further funding round of the GoodWill Fund in the autumn of this year, and we are aiming to distribute a total of £20,000 at that stage.”
Dr Jock Ramsay
Chair of the GoodWill Fund Committee
To support projects that enhance an understanding of the culture, history, and society of Ross-shire.
The 2023 award winners from the Cultural Element were:
“Encouraging other writers was very important to Neil Gunn and in this spirit the Trust has, since 1988, run the biennial Neil Gunn Writing Competition, to give opportunities to writers throughout the UK and beyond to write to a theme and to have their work read and judged by a panel of experts. The competition can only take place if sponsorship is found for the prize monies, and the Trust is grateful and absolutely delighted that this year all the prizes in both adult poetry and adult short story sections of the competition will be sponsored by the GlenWyvis Distillery GoodWill Fund. This is a huge boost to us and feels particularly apt given that the distillery is sited just along the road from the Neil Gunn Monument and also that Neil Gunn was an Excise Officer in the whisky industry prior to becoming a full-time writer”.
Charlotte Macarthur, Treasurer
The Neil Gunn Trust
“We are delighted to receive our grant from the GoodWill Fund. This will help us to set up a sensory space within the school to support our learners. We look forward to planning the space with the children”.
Strathpeffer Primary School
To provide equipment to children whose education would suffer without such provision.
The 2023 award winners from the Educational Element were:
To support the recovery and entrepreneurial development of existing and new businesses and organisations within the Dingwall area.
The 2023 award winners from the Entrepreneurial Element were:
Woodside Croft Flowers
DP Digital Media
“For so many years, Dingwall didn’t have a distilling industry, it had disappeared. To have that back and to have that focal point for Dingwall and the surrounding area is just fantastic.
Doing things like this with the Goodwill Fund helps to reinforce that. It really backs it up. It proves to people that the distillery is all about being part of and helping the community, whether that’s businesses or schools, whatever it happens to be – that involvement is critically important.
With the funding we have received, we are going to support local businesses and work with them to produce an advertisement video to be used on Social Media. We are delighted that we can join in on supporting our local community.”
Ian Forsyth, Director
DP Digital Media
