An update from Craven Community Land Trust

Craven Community Land Trust (CLT) in North Yorkshire is all about creating and helping new, affordable, energy efficient, small homes for rent to people living or working in the area. Like all CLTs, these homes would be affordable and community owned forever. The trust doesn’t have any properties at the moment but are making good progress in working towards their vision.

Starting off in Settle

In Autumn 2021 we held a community engagement event called ‘Settle – what’s not to like?’

The event was open to anyone in the area, and the purpose was to gather information on what the community felt worked well, what could be improved on, what services might be missing or what we already had in the community. The event wasn’t around housing specifically – although it is our main area of focus – and it was clear to see that it was an important and emotive subject for the people who attended the event.

It was great to see everyone that attended, particularly as it’s a while since we’ve been able to have a community event! It was a really useful opportunity to meet other local organisations and discuss opportunities to work together in future.

We also got to meet Andrew, the new Rural Housing Enabler for the area and put faces to names for Sarah and Angela from the Community Led Homes North Yorkshire & East Riding hub.

We’ve been busy writing up the results of the engagement event and these will be available shortly.

Two possible flats in Skipton

Following the event, Andrew approached us about an opportunity to purchase two flats in the Skipton area. Whilst we are in very early stages of discussion, we’re feeling very positive about the opportunity and it could be the perfect starting point for Craven CLT.

The importance of networking

During the event, we were made aware of an organisation in Settle that we could potentially work in partnership with, and again, whilst things are at early stages, we’ve begun the conversations around the opportunities for working together.

It just shows that getting people together and starting those conversations, can really help move a project on, whilst gathering some really important information and giving the community a voice!

Finally, we’ve had a really productive new year with our first board meeting and the creation of our new website which we’ll be launching later this month and we look forward to sharing.

We’re really hopeful that we can make positive progress this year and who knows we may have our first properties available for rent before the end of the year!

For more information or to contact us directly you can find us on Facebook.