THE ACTION PORTY STORY

Action Porty grew out of a campaign to save the former Portobello Old Parish Church buildings for community use. By chance, our first meeting on 16th April 2016 was held only a few days before the Community Empowerment Act (2015) extended the community right to buy to include urban areas. After a long community consultation and mobilisation process, Action Porty's purchase of Bellfield for the community became the first successful urban community right to buy in the country. The Scottish Land fund agreed to cover 94% of the purchase price. Bellfield re-opened to the community with a day of celebrations on Saturday 23rd June 2018.

However, from that first meeting in 2016, the vision of Action Porty has always been far broader. We have been asking not simply 'How do we save this building?' but 'How can Porty organise as a community to better recognise and meet our needs, our challenges and our opportunities?' To this end Action Porty became a Development Trust and our company articles include the advancement of: community development, urban regeneration, citizenship, environmental protection, recreational facilities, the arts, heritage and culture, and relief of those in hardship.

Action Porty has undertaken far broader community consultation and mobilisation, such as the Action Westbank subgroup's imaginative two-day community consultation. Hundreds of folk joined us in taking over the Town Hall to collectively develop community-led designs for the Westbank site. By developing a community led vision for what had previously been a developer-led process (one that had been presented to the community by Edinburgh Council as an inevitability), we helped halt the selling off of the 5 a side football pitches. We are always ready to work with Edinburgh Council on our win-win proposal for them to be able to secure funding and the community to secure an improved site.

Action Porty board members consulted a range of initiatives in Portobello including people on the boards of the Wash House, Tribe, Oi Musica, Porty Central (who have since saved and now manage the Town Hall), the Community Council, PEDAL, etc. All agreed on the need for an anchor organisation for Portobello. We then fully consulted our members before taking on this wider role.

As a result, Action Porty restructured to separate the running of the Belfield community complex from this community anchor organisation role.

This wider role involves helping provide a point for strategic coordination between existing initiatives and for supporting the emergence of new initiatives that can meet the needs of Porty and its people, and rise to the ever-changing challenges we face.

In November 2021 - with facilitation from Grassroots to Global - we helped develop a distributed assembly of 14 conversations generated by local people: ‘Heart Talk Porty’. Some fantastic community initiatives emerged from this, including input to try to reshape the proposed developments at Seafield, a community cinema, a focus on supporting people through the stages of grief, more childcare initiatives, and the extremely successful Porty Community Fridge initiative (which formally became part of Action Porty in Autumn 2023, with representation on the Action Porty board).

Action Porty was originally established in 2016 as a company limited by guarantee, with charitable status, but in 2022, the organisation was converted to a Community Benefit Society, to enable us to run a community share issue to part-fund the redevelopment of Bellfield. In converting to a Community Benefit Society, Action Porty retained our existing charitable objectives and preserved the organisation’s charitable status. Action Porty remains a membership-led organisation, with our Board of trustees elected annually at our Annual General Meeting. To complete the conversion from a company to a Community Benefit Society, all our members were transferred across in 2023.

In January, 2022, Action Porty became the only non-statutory organisation to be represented on the ‘Sounding Board’ which was established by Edinburgh Council to advise on the proposed development of Seafield. Action Porty has worked alongside the local community councils on the sounding board to encourage the commissioning of a master plan to address the multi-ownership of the site and ensure a rounded development with sufficient infrastructure and which addresses local housing and transport needs.

Towards the end of 2024, Action Porty collaborated with Porty Community Energy to run another 4 conversations under the Heart-Talk Porty banner. This included a well-attended discussion of concerns about the future of the former Portobello Police Station, which Police Scotland have declared surplus and plan to place on the market. The outcome of this discussion was an agreement that the Police Station should be retained by the community, Action Porty have now submitted an Asset Transfer Request, which is currently under consideration by Police Scotland.