Willie Clarke, Neighbourhood Watch Scotland SCIO

Neighbourhood Watch Scotland is a registered charity and is fully supported by a board of volunteer trustees. The organisation operates from Stirling and comprises 3 members of staff – Willie Clark, NWS Coordinator; Mark Armstrong, Community Support Officer and Varrie McDevitt, Admin and Finance Officer. Together, Willie, Mark and Varrie have over 75 years experience working in Community Safety and have been involved in supporting Neighbourhood Watch Schemes and members directly and indirectly for much of that time.

Currently there are over 1864 registered schemes in Scotland, covering over 190,000 households. This number is growing steadily as new Watches are established.40 new Watches alone have set up since March.

Willie told us, “Our aim is to help people work together to make their communities safer and to support and encourage everyone to look out for each other.

By using the ALERT platform NWS and their partners are able to communicate directly with all NWS members and registered ALERT users across Scotland.

Through the Neighbourhood Watch Scotland and Rural Watch Scotland portals we currently have 24,573 direct users registered.

We promote a partnership approach with regards to key trusted information providers and work closely with many partners involved in Community Safety from a crime, safety and resilience perspective. This partnership approach ensures we get the right information to the right people at the right time.

Since the COVID-19 lockdown we have sent 259 ALERTS across Scotland reaching in excess of 1.8M people. 104 of these ALERTS have been COVID-19 related.

The values of Neighbourhood Watch are essential to ensuring that these ALERTS and the information / advice is shared and that it reaches and supports the most vulnerable in our communities.”

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