Meet the Directors and Board Advisors

The Garve & District Development Company aims to regenerate and develop the community in which you live and work, now and in the future.

What are Directors and Board Advisors responsible for?

The Board of Directors are responsible for:

Strategic and operational planning, the promotion of our Community Development Plan which identifies our community's priorities
Commissioning a programme of new projects and upgrading existing community assets to meet these needs
Monitoring projects to keep them on track
Ensuring the company is run properly
The financial well-being of the company

What are Advisors responsible for?

From time to time we invite advisors to join the Board to offer their assistance and share their experience and skills. - as per Clause 75 of our Memorandum of Association.

Who are we?

Sue Tarr

Sue is a well known supporter of community groups both here in Garve & District and in the wider Ross-shire area. She is a crofter who keeps cattle at Gorstan and also has a horticultural background which gives a broad range of practical skills.

Sue attended Garve Primary and Dingwall Academy, and knows the local area well. She feels there are challenges for small rural communities like ours, but know that in the Highlands we are good at coming together and helping each other out.

Sue is currently a local representative on the EDF Corriemoillie Education Fund panel, her interests include nature and wildlife.

Andrew Biddlecombe

Andrew feels that as local residents we all have a part to play in helping to define our local community's future, and that we all have a multitude of differing skills and perspectives that need to be accommodated and catered for. Andrew is happy to share his skills and experiences in this respect within the community, and invest time and effort to this effect.

He has lived in Garve now for 5 1/2 years, and considers himself fortunate to be able to call this area home.

He comes from a background in various IT and Telecommunications technologies, and as well as working for some of the IT Industries largest organisations across the globe, he has also gained valuable experiences through historically having run his own small business for a number of years.

Andrew works with many of the UK's larger organisations in his professional role (supporting the security and resilience of many of our Critical National Infrastructure networks and services), and building business solutions that seek to drive further business potential through the creative use of technologies to achieve this.

Andrew looks forward to being able to engage with the board and staff and most important, his community.

John Fenwick

John lives at Gorstan with his wife Jeanette. He originally joined the Garve and District Energy group to help bring the benefits of energy efficiency to the community. His house is an energy efficient “PassivHouse” but John’s zest and energy for community projects is far from passive. He greatly enjoys being part of a board leading a range of community development projects.

John moved to the Highlands from Tyneside in 2013 after retiring from a career in the NHS Path labs. An entire working life in the NHS on the shop floor and in management taught him that every problem has a solution if you’re prepared to rise to the challenge, consider all the options and get everyone on board. John’s an enthusiastic photographer, he likes to shoot mountain landscapes, but as an active member of Dingwall Camera Club has turned his hand to a variety of subjects. He organises competitions and workshops for the club as well as helping members of the Dingwall Men’s Shed with their photography. He would like to see a community club for people to share their photographs and learn from each other.

Mike Franklin

Mike moved from Swindon in Wiltshire to Garve in February 1997. Since then he has been self-employed as a contract software engineer, running programming training courses across the country and abroad and, more recently, with a partner down in England, he started a company running a photographic printing lab focused primarily on schools photography.

His main hobby/interest is mountaineering and in particular winter ski mountaineering, this is what originally brought him up to live in the Highlands. He also spends a fair bit of time working in his garden.

So after a quarter of a century in Garve, Mike felt it was time to give a little something back and feels his experience in running a company may be of some use to the Development Company.