Hopes and plans for the New Year
HBM
Terry Gore manages homelessness charity Catching Lives, a self-funding day centre in Canterbury's Station Road East. The service is running on empty and needs to find around £100,000 to fund each year. For more information on Catching Lives or to donate, visit www.catchinglives.org
What are your New Year's Resolutions?
Dropping four stone and giving up smoking.
What are you looking forward to in the New Year?
Working for Catching Lives and making sure we ensure we get the funding for this vital service for another year.
Canterbury resident Ian McQuaibe, 25, was homeless for more than five years and now volunteers at Catching Lives and as a youth worker at Thanington Resource Centre.
What are your New Year's Resolutions?
To get a well-paid job and to give up smoking.
What are you looking forward to in the New Year?
It just being the New Year. I'll see how it goes. You never know what might happen in the future.
Margaret Burns is chairman of Herne Bay in Bloom. Herne Bay was the overall winner of the coastal town category in the 2012 Britain In Bloom awards and a silver gilt medal winner in the competition.
What are your New Year's Resolutions?
To put more into the community. I was born in Herne Bay and I feel it's our duty to keep uplifting it for residents and visitors.
What are you looking forward to in the New Year?
Making Herne Bay even more beautiful. We're very involved in the Queen Elizabeth Coastal Park – the new gardens near the Kings Hall and the clock tower.
Gerald McCarthy is the founder of the Bay Promo Team, which puts on Herne Bay events such as the Zombie Crawl, which raises money for Kent Air Ambulance.
What are your New Year's Resolutions?
To reach more people in Herne Bay so we become more of a hub. We want to bulk out the social calendar. We're trying our best with Halloweek, the Zombie Crawl and Christmas Ball.
What are you looking forward to in the New Year?
Putting on more events and promoting other people's. We're looking forward to a big sci-fi event in June with replica Daleks, a 45-foot marshmallow man and superheroes. We're also doing a Titanic-themed ball for the centenary celebrations of the Kings Hall.
David Birch is chairman and trustee of Herne Bay Historical Records Society. He was born in the Bay, and his granddaughter was the 269th Holness to be baptised in Herne Church.
What are your New Year's Resolutions?
I'm 80 years old and I've never made a New Year's Resolution but I'd love to see my youngest granddaughter reach school age.
What are you looking forward to in the New Year?
I'd love to see the society, which is a registered charity, have its own income and premises so we have more control over what we own.
We've got a smashing little town, but I think we come third to Canterbury and Whitstable. I'd like to see the town's fortunes improve. We need someone who will push and shove and drive it forward.
Whitstable artist Carl Stafford, 48, is giving away his paintings – all 100 of them. He hired Whitstable's Horsebridge Centre for an exhibition called Nothing's Free, in which the twist is that the paintings are free.
What are your New Year's Resolutions?
I don't generally make resolutions as they get broken on January 2.
What are you looking forward to in the New Year?
To becoming a multimillionaire. I get a lottery ticket every few weeks. To make a million from my art, I'll have to wait until I'm dead and gone.
HB Times 3rd Jan 2013
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