Irvine’s Coastwatch and community resilience volunteers will now join forces to benefit the town.

Coastwatch volunteers, who already support the Coastguard and Lifeboat teams, now plan to work in partnership with Irvine’s Community Resilience Volunteer Service – a new charity that helped deliver essentials amid the coronavirus lockdown.

Coastwatch secretary Anne Dunlop told the Times: “Coastwatch are combining resources with the Community Resilience Volunteer Service and forming a dynamic volunteer partnership.

“We’re staying as two independent organisations but we’re now going to be working together for the community.

John Thomson from the Community Resilience Volunteer Service said: “It will be the two organisations working in partnership and sharing resources, and our experiences and skills. It just makes sense that we all work together as one big team.

“The whole reason we’re doing it is to benefit the community – any organisation on its own is good but if you come together things get better.

“We’re part of the regional resilience partnership and quite active in the West of Scotland so everybody in the area is going to benefit from joint working.

“We set up because there was a gap within the resilience world for an umbrella organisation – the advantage of us is if you phoned us for help in search and rescue, logistics, communications, welfare or first aid one phone call gets you to everything. We’ve those relative skills in the one organisation and it is managed centrally and coordinated.

“We are a young charity and we’ve came a long way in a short period of time. COVID-19 has in one way helped us. We found ourselves having to do things we weren’t planning and supporting in excess of 2,000 a week at the height of the pandemic.

“If an incident is happening in an area we’re now able to put on additional people and resources.

“We are a voluntary sector organisation and we’re no claiming to be the professionals but we’re there to support them in any way possibly with the diversity we have.

For more information on both groups visit www.crvs.org.uk and www.coastwatchirvine.co.uk/