Our Story

As Lee Robb scrolled through Facebook one evening in October 2017 she saw yet another negative Facebook conversation about Carrickfergus (Carrick for short) and decided things had to change. She created a Facebook group and called it positive carrickfergus – a place to tell a positive and hopeful story about her hometown. Then she sat back, slightly terrified at raising her head above the parapet, and wondered what would happen next.

She found out that lots of other people wanted to be part of that positive story and a movement was born. The residents of Carrick really wanted to share positive news and ideas about how the community could work together to make the town a great place to live.

Lee purposely didn’t advertise the group or actively seek followers. The group had to make sense to people if it was to survive and needed to grow organically. Thankfully it did just that! As of January 2021 the group has over 5,000 members and continues to grow at a steady pace.

Positive carrickfergus is underpinned by an asset based community development approach. That means we start with what is strong, rather than what is wrong. We do not believe that deficit based approaches to community development have improved communities. We do believe that people are so much more than their needs.

By deliberately thinking about Carrick as a whole place, and everyone as part of the community, we want to break down boundaries between local businesses, community groups, the council and residents so that we can work together. In practice that means that part of our work is about raising the visibility of people who are beavering away making Carrick a better place. In response, people often tell us that there is so much more going on than they realised.

In real life Lee has spent a lot of time in the last few years building new relationships with people in Carrick and taking opportunities to make stuff happen. With a group of fourteen women who did not previously know each other, Lee held two Big Lunches in the Town Hall in the summer of 2018. Lee also helped to bring Big Telly’s Creative Shop project to Carrick in 2018 which became their most successful Creative Shop proving that when given the opportunity people in Carrick really want to engage. Big Telly have returned a number of times since and have fallen in love with Carrick.

In summer 2020 positive carrickfergus was awarded a National Lottery Community Fund grant from their Emerging Futures programme. As a result, they set up a community interest company. The funding supported the delivery of the Talk of the Town project exploring the future of Carrickfergus and the community’s role in it. From this project, two strands of work emerged, aiming to fulfil the wildest dreams of Carrick residents – bringing more shops to the town centre and more arts and culture activities. Positive Carrickfergus has since helped birth Carrick Greengrocers, a community owned fruit and veg shop based in West Street, and has received further funding to develop a community-led arts strategy and put on events in the Town Hall with the aim of working with the council to put the community in the lead in terms of managing this vital community asset that should be at the centre of the regeneration of our town centre.