Braw Clan – A Community’s Story
Braw Clan was awarded £9,978 by the Nadara Glenkerie Wind Farm Community Fund towards the cost of arts performances and warm spaces for local residents.
Braw Clan is a volunteer-led Scots Language Theatre group that works to preserve and promote the Scots language. It is run in the rural village halls of Symington and Roberton, based in Biggar, South Lanarkshire.
Its network of rural theatre professionals brings over 380 years of combined experience, with credits including Shakespeare's Globe, the BBC, ITV and Netflix.
Soup And A Story is Braw Clan's flagship community programme for older rural adults. Each month, the project offers a free, healthy hot meal in a warm village hall, good company, and a live performance of a Scots story delivered by a professional actor.
The Project: Soup And A Story
Soup And A Story runs from October to the end of May in the rural neighbouring village halls of Symington and Roberton. By the start of the 2025–26 season project, Braw Clan had already delivered the project more than 70 times, drawing on established relationships with local caterers, actors and community groups.
The organisation sources food locally, including vegetables from Biggar Community Market Garden, and works with a local vintage and charity-shop supplier for crockery and cutlery, keeping the project's carbon footprint low.
Why Cultural Funding Matters
Cultural funding is often framed as a "nice to have", but the story of Braw Clan's Soup And A Story programme makes the opposite case: that funding language, storytelling and performance can be one of the most cost-effective ways to tackle loneliness, protect wellbeing, and hold a community's identity together.
This case study draws out the transferable lessons for funders and community organisations that may be thinking about how, and why, to invest in cultural activity, particularly in rural and ageing communities.
Project Reach
In the 2025–26 season:
- Soup And A Story served over 700 participants across Symington and Roberton.
- 722 total participant attendances were recorded across the season, including teachers, parents and children from two nearby primary schools.
- 392 unique individuals attended, based on ticket booking data, plus a further 16 actors, Braw Clan staff and catering staff, bringing the total number of individuals benefited to 408.
- The project was booked out for eight consecutive months.
- 53% of participants attended more than one session across the season, a pattern the organisation views as a positive sign of community bonding rather than a barrier to reach.
- Attendees were overwhelmingly older people aged 60 and over.
In their Words
| “Coming to Roberton is like getting a warm hug. The food is amazing, the welcome warm and the readings are brilliant.” |
| “This is a crucial component of community life. It maintains memory of local life, history and culture. It maintains a crucial aspect of linguistic culture.” |
| “Continually amazed at the quality performances a ten minute drive from our house in a very rural area. Brilliant!!” |
| “As ever it was excellent, providing an excuse for people to meet up and chat to each other, provides such a valuable service to humans who might not have a great deal of contact with others.” |
| “Thank you for yet another great story read in a truly entertaining way. It's been a great season - the highlight of my month. So glad I found Braw Clan.” |
Intergenerational Engagement
Beyond its core older-adult audience, Soup And A Story extended its reach to local schoolchildren through a Christmas Band carol concert in December. For many of the children involved, it was the first time they had sung or spoken Scots in any kind of performance. Two unique Christmas poems, drawn from the memories of the Symington and Roberton audiences and translated into Scots, were performed and gifted back to each community.
Wider Impact
Feedback from those attendees outlined three intertwined benefits: combating social isolation, supporting mental health and wellbeing, and easing the practical burden of heating costs during the coldest months.
On social connection, one participant reflected that they would “otherwise be stuck in the house not seeing many people,” while another described the sessions as bringing “small villages together,” a value felt especially strongly by those with limited regular social contact.
On wellbeing, attendees repeatedly described the emotional and psychological lift of the sessions, with one noting that gathering together felt particularly meaningful “in a time of energy crisis,” and another explaining that a performance's music stirred personal memories that stayed with them well beyond the event itself.
Conclusion: What This Means for Funding Culture and Tradition
Soup And A Story is, on the surface, a small and modest offering: a monthly meal and a story, delivered in two village halls. However, the evidence gathered across the 2025–26 season shows that this kind of funding does far more than keep a tradition visible, it keeps it alive, and it keeps the people around it connected, well and warm.
Funding culture in this way delivers measurable and overlapping returns that sit across multiple funding priorities: reduced social isolation, improved mental health and wellbeing, practical relief during periods of fuel poverty, language and heritage preservation, intergenerational education, and continued investment in local economies and supply chains.
Rural and ageing communities, in particular, stand to gain the most from this model, precisely because they are so often underserved by mainstream service provision and cultural infrastructure.
Soup And A Story is not a single line item under "arts," but an integrated community investment, one that keeps tradition, language and community alive together, and one whose value compounds the longer it is sustained.
Read more about the Nadara Glenkerie Wind Farm Community fund.