Lottery grants a big boost

Northcliffe organisations have received a boost thanks to funding made available by Lotterywest.

Northcliffe Visitor Centre will receive $23,350 from the Event Cancellation Relief Fund due to the cancellation of the 2020 Karri Cup MTB Challenge, while Northcliffe Family and Community Centre will receive $9895 from the Sector Support for Resilient Organisations Fund and Southern Forest Arts will receive $37,000.

Northcliffe Visitor Centre board president Jim Sale said the Karri Cup revenue was a key support of the centre.

“This revenue is vital to the visitor centre operation and will enable the visitor centre to continue to offer high quality visitor services to the community and visitors to the Northcliffe region,” he said.

“The State Government initiative in setting up the Lotterywest COVID-19 Relief Fund has really made a significant difference to small organisations such as ours and we are very appreciative of the support it provides.”

Southern Forest Arts’ Understory Art in Nature manager Fiona Sinclair said the Lotterywest funds were a game-changer for her organisation.

“$16,000 will be invested in the scoping of a new collaborative intra-regional arts project and the remaining $21,000 will help recoup costs lost through tourism collapse in recent months, support the development of a new SFA website and create new digital publications to make the Understory experience COVID safe,” she said.

Northcliffe Family and Community Centre manager Oona Ormsby said the COVID-19 pandemic had highlighted how outdated its technology was and was grateful to Lotterywest for providing funds to update its computers.

“COVID really highlighted the necessity to have hardware that is able to keep up with updating software and programs that we rely on for our everyday functioning,” she said.

“Lotterywest approved $9895 to purchase office computers and a new laptop for our centre to keep our hardware up-to-date in an ever evolving technological world, which will relieve a lot of stress moving forward as we begin to reopen all of our services as we will be able to plan for more online delivery, online networking, and online participation.”