TWO community groups in Winkleigh are celebrating a cash boost, following the latest round of announcements from the Big Lottery Fund's Awards for All programme.

Winkleigh Community Centre has scooped £7,300 from the fund.

The money will help provide a programme of skills for young parents in the area, where they will see how to cook, bake and learn dietary management in the home. They will also learn craft skills such as sewing and making cloth.

And Winkleigh Youth Club has been awarded £4,415 to install a solar water heating system at its base at Winkleigh Sports Centre.

Brian Holland, of the youth club, said he was delighted by the news, which would benefit not only the club, but the 'very successful' Blue Coat Children's Centre from Torrington, which has an outreach base at Winkleigh.

The youth club, which meets on Wednesdays and Saturdays, is thriving, regularly attracting between 30 and 50 young people to its meetings.

'We do a lot of cooking at our Saturday Club, which obviously uses a lot of hot water, and the Blue Coats, which caters for mothers and young children, almost from birth, have quite an intensive use of warm water,' said Brian.

'We are not on mains gas at Winkleigh, bottled gas is too fiddly for our use, so we are all electric, which isn't the most efficient way to heat water.

'We decided the youth club would take responsibility for getting the funding for the solar water heating, as an attempt to show our green credentials — and I hope this will be a good example to set the kids.

'We have a long term aim to get a photovoltaic system set up, so this will be the first step towards that.'

The awards to Winkleigh formed part of a £623,996 give-away by the Awards for All programme in its latest round of grants.

Mark Cotton, Big Lottery Fund head of region, said: 'Looking after and improving the environment is high on the agenda for many people. I am delighted to see such an array of environmentally-friendly projects getting Lottery funding this month.

l Anyone who would like more information regarding Winkleigh Youth Club can contact Brian Holland at [email protected]">[email protected]