What Ayrshire’s Own Community Groups Already Do
The first post in this series asked why learning anything about how Dynamic Dunure operates requires a statutory obstacle course —a Freedom of Information request and an internal review, ending in confirmation that no minutes exist. The second looked at how leading Scottish community trusts — on Mull, in Comrie, in Applecross — do things differently: published minutes, open meetings, accounts on the website, project documents shared in full before decisions are taken.
A fair response might be that those are distant places with different circumstances. So this final post stays in Ayrshire. It looks at three examples much closer to home — one in the same council area pursuing the same kind of project, one running the kind of visitor centre Dunure is being promised, and one from Dunure itself.
Barr: the same council, the same kind of project
Barr is a South Ayrshire village considerably smaller than Dunure. Since 2019, Barr Community SCIO (SC049703) has been working — with South Ayrshire Council — to take over the village hall and create a modern, multi-purpose community hub with a café, meeting rooms, hall, kitchen and public toilets. In other words: a project of the same type as the Helm, with the same council, a few miles down the coast.
Here is how Barr Community SCIO communicates:
- Board minutes are published monthly on the village website, listed by date, year after year — including correspondence with South Ayrshire Council, and even a note when a meeting didn’t take place.
- The full business plan for the community hub is published, together with its appendices, the asset transfer application, newsletters, letters to members about the future of the project, workshop reports, and the posters and plans displayed at a community open day.
- Membership is open and substantial. The business plan itself records over 120 members — in a village a fraction of Dunure’s size — and states that membership is open to everyone in the community aged 16 or over, with junior membership from 12.
When Barr’s asset transfer request went to South Ayrshire Council, the Council published the application documents on its own website and invited written representations from anyone. The full paper trail — from community aspiration to Council decision — is public.
If a village of Barr’s size can publish its minutes every month and its business plan in full, the question of capacity does not arise. This is a choice, and Barr made it.
Source: barrvillage.co.uk (Development page: minutes archive, business plan, newsletters); south-ayrshire.gov.uk (asset transfer notice for Barr Community SCIO).
Friends of Dundonald Castle: the venue Dunure is being promised
Friends of Dundonald Castle SCIO (SC031541) runs the visitor centre and café at Dundonald Castle — an operation of exactly the kind the Helm is intended to become: a heritage visitor attraction and community hub in a South Ayrshire village, dependent on local volunteers (over 65 of them, alongside 15 staff) and welcoming around 29,000 visitors a year.
FODC’s communication practice:
- A detailed trustees’ annual report is prepared each year and is publicly available — describing activities, staffing, volunteer programmes, funding arrangements (including support from Historic Environment Scotland and South Ayrshire Council’s Comfort Scheme), and the year’s finances. An earlier FODC annual report is hosted on South Ayrshire Council’s own website.
- Membership is actively promoted, with sign-up online or on paper at the Visitor Centre, and tangible benefits attached: free castle entry, priority booking, early notice of volunteering opportunities, and an annual members’ social.
- News is continuous. The website carries a running news archive — awards, excavations, volunteer recruitment, reopening dates.
FODC is the operating reality of what a heritage visitor centre in a South Ayrshire village involves. Its openness is part of why it works: volunteers, members and funders can all see what the organisation does and how it is run.
Source: dundonaldcastle.org.uk (Membership, Community and News pages); FODC trustees’ annual report (OSCR register, SC031541); VisitScotland case study, 2025.
Dunure’s own precedent: the 2019 Community Action Plan
The most telling example is from Dunure itself.
In 2019, North Carrick Community Benefit Company published the Dunure Community Action Plan 2019–2024 — and it remains freely available on the NCCBC website today. What makes it a model is not its conclusions but its transparency about how those conclusions were reached:
- The methodology is stated. A community survey was carried out across North Carrick’s five community council areas between February and March 2018, with the support of the Scottish Community Development Centre. Two named consultancies — Jura Consultants and Icecream Architecture — were commissioned to develop the plans. Drop-in events and school workshops are described, with dates.
- Participation is quantified. Almost 290 children and adults gave their views across ten local schools, including Fisherton Primary.
- The findings are published — including the unflattering ones. The plan records that the state of the roads was the highest-ranked dislike among adults. Nobody had to take anyone’s word for what the community thought; the results were on the table.
Anyone in Dunure can read that document and check what was asked, who answered, and what they said. That is what consultation evidence looks like when an organisation is confident in it.
It is worth being scrupulously fair here: the published 2019 plan records that adults highlighted a purpose-built community centre, and alternative uses for Kennedy Hall, among the priorities for Kennedy Park. Publication cuts both ways — it gives supporters of a community centre a citable, verifiable evidence base, and it lets everyone see precisely what was supported: a community centre in general terms, as one priority among seven, before any specific building, cost, business plan or funding gap existed. That is the entire point. Published evidence can be weighed; unpublished evidence can only be believed or disbelieved.
The contrast
Dynamic Dunure has stated that surveys show community support for its proposals.
Those surveys — the questions asked, the number of responses, how respondents were reached, and the full results — have not been published or shared.
Set that against the three examples above. Barr publishes its business plan and monthly minutes. Friends of Dundonald Castle publishes detailed annual reports and two newsletters. And Dunure’s own Community Action Plan — produced only a few years ago, about this village, partly in this village’s school — published its survey methodology, its participation numbers, and its results in full, dislikes included.
The standard being asked of Dynamic Dunure is not imported from Mull or Perthshire. It is the standard already met in Barr, in Dundonald, and in Dunure itself.
The ask
If survey evidence exists and supports the Helm proposals, publishing it costs nothing and strengthens the project’s case with funders, councillors and residents alike. Specifically:
- publish the survey questions as they were put to respondents;
- publish the number of responses and how respondents were recruited;
- publish the full results, including neutral and negative responses; and
- state when the survey was conducted and what information respondents had at the time.
The 2019 Dunure Community Action Plan shows exactly how to do this, because it has already been done — here.
Dynamic Dunure is cordially invited to respond to anything in this article. Any response received will be published here in full and unedited. Corrections to any factual error, supported by evidence, will be made promptly and acknowledged.
Sources
- Barr Community SCIO (SC049703) — barrvillage.co.uk/development (published board minutes 2024–25; Barr Community Hub Asset Transfer and Business Plan with appendices; newsletters and member letters; open day materials)
- South Ayrshire Council — asset transfer notice, Barr Community SCIO (Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015, Part 5) — south-ayrshire.gov.uk
- Friends of Dundonald Castle SCIO (SC031541) — dundonaldcastle.org.uk (Membership; Community; News archive); FODC Trustees’ Annual Report 2024 (OSCR register); VisitScotland visitor economy case study, 2025; FODC Annual Report 2018 (hosted at south-ayrshire.gov.uk)
- North Carrick Community Benefit Company (SC045947) —Dunure Community Action Plan 2019–2024 (published August 2019), nccbc.org.uk/north-carrick-action-plans; consultation methodology at pp. 4–5 (SCDC survey Feb–Mar 2018; Jura Consultants; icecream architecture; c.290 participants across ten schools incl. Fisherton Primary); adult survey findings at Priorities 5–6