A Gift for SCARS

The 2005 IWA National Festival comes to our doorstep at Preston Brook over the August Bank Holiday, giving SCARS a golden opportunity to plead the cause of restoration to tens of thousands of people from near and far.

Besides attracting considerable local and national public support, the Festival also brings together 'people of influence' - local Councillors, their Officers, local MPs, senior representatives of the major funding bodies, navigation authorities and development agencies. It is these people in particular that we need to reach and convince of the merits of restoring the Sankey Canal.

The Executive has decided to be as high profile at this event as possible. We will have our usual sales stall, but we will also have a separate 'high quality' marquee featuring strong visual images of the canal and an audio/visual presentation, all aimed at pushing the message out and "meeting and greeting". We are in discussions with two other waterway restoration groups in the Halton area who also hope the Festival will help them promote their cause. We hope that this partnership will help us to attract grants to put on high quality displays and to produce about 20,000 high quality fold-out leaflets extolling the virtue of waterway restoration locally.

Our two stalls at the Festival (and we plan to do something similar at the preceding Halton Show) will require more staffing than we usually enjoy, so we really would welcome help from our Members. As well as people on the Stall and at the Exhibition, assistance beforehand in putting together the display material and AV presentation would be very much appreciated. We also plan to gain the maximum from these efforts by using the material produced as the basis of a professional portfolio of material with which to woo any would-be grant-givers in the future.

If you are at all interested in helping with this work or at the events themselves, please get in touch with any member of the Executive Committee, or directly with myself on 07766 231604 or email andrewscreen@btinternet.com.

Andy Screen

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