FIVE years on from the launch of Streets Ahead, our community campaign designed to improve the city one street at a time is still transforming Glasgow into a cleaner, greener place to be.

With the fantastic support of our partners City Charitable Trust, Glasgow City Council, Scottish Fire and Rescue, ScotRail and Glasgow Housing Association, we can celebrate another wonderful 12 months of improving communities all over the city.

Over the last year, we have watched some outstanding projects take root.

We kicked off in style, with the kind of enormous community clean-up for which Streets Ahead has become famous.

Organised by the inspirational team behind local group Love Milton, the event attracted more than 50 people including dedicated pupils, teachers and parents from Miltonbank Primary and the owners of businesses along Skerry Street.

The result was impressive – dozens of bags of rubbish collected, happy residents and delighted volunteers.

It was the first part of a community-led questionnaire project called Milton Talks, designed to find out what matters most to local people.

Love Milton was a winner in the Streets Ahead awards last year, helping to raise the group’s profile within and beyond its own community.

It was a fantastic start - and things didn’t stop there.

Over the next few months, clean-up kings and queens materialised all over the city, from the wonderful women of Glendale Café in Pollokshields, to the hero helpers of Hillhead.

Glendale Café is a weekly café for women keen to meet their neighbours and learn new skills. They decided to clean-up the street outside the building, bringing more people together as a result – and creating a much tidier and friendlier environment for visitors.

Action Hillhead, Glasgow University and Glasgow City Council joined forces in the west end of the city to clean up the streets of Hillhead, building on years of fantastic environmental work already being done in the area.

Schools have been at the heart of our initiative since we launched in 2011. This year, primaries, secondaries, nurseries all over the city got on board and there have been some amazing examples of Streets Ahead school projects – find out more later in the supplement.

It wasn’t just schools who supported our campaign – businesses, railway stations, pensioners’ clubs, voluntary groups and fire stations all got on board.

And we also welcomed back some old friends, celebrating some fantastic successes of their own.

Gardening charity South Seeds, which triumphed in last year's Evening Times Streets Ahead Awards was awarded £18,500 from Waitrose.

South Seeds covers Govanhill, Queen's Park, Strathbungo, Crosshill and East Pollokshields, transforming abandoned wastelands into beautiful gardens, providing energy efficiency advice, running sessions on growing food and reducing waste and bringing neighbours together for community events.

The group's newest site, the Urban Croft at the edge of Queen's Park recreation ground, is blooming following months of digging, planting and weeding carried out by the band of dedicated growers and gardeners, and there are new projects going on at the group’s Allison Street and Queen's Drive Main community gardens - so the cash boost is very welcome.

We also returned to one of our first Streets Ahead projects, the Pacitti Garden on Paisley Road West, to find out how our grant helped them get a fantastic community resource up and running.

The colourful, cheerful space is a very different place from the abandoned, messy rectangle of waste ground we visited in 2011.

And the group behind the maintenance of the garden are celebrating receiving a major award for their efforts.

The garden won a Keep Scotland Beautiful award in the It's Your Neighbourhood campaign – a great tribute to the dozens of volunteers who work hard to ensure everyone can enjoy the Pacitti Garden.

There were more Streets Ahead grants awarded to local projects, including £2000 for Mosspark Primary, who will use it to transform an empty green space into a community garden, and £2000 for Urban Roots, who are running workshops for commuters and schoolchildren on the south side of the city, to tie in with the work they are doing at Mount Florida and Cathcart Railway stations.

There were tea dances and Christmas celebrations, litter-picks and garden parties and earlier this week, our busy year rounded off with our annual awards ceremony, hosted by Glasgow City Council, in the stunning surroundings of the Winter Gardens at the People’s Palace.

Once again, the city’s growers, gardeners, litter-pickers and community stalwarts have helped us to transform Glasgow.

Over the next few pages, you can catch up with all of the excellent work carried out under the Streets Ahead banner this year, starting with our tribute to all the amazing awards winners and runners-up from Wednesday night’s ceremony.

And you will see that the simple idea which started our campaign in the first place – that one person can change a street, and one person on every street can change a city – continues to inspire people all over Glasgow.

For more information on how you can get involved, visit www.eveningtimes.co.uk, email streetsahead@eveningtimes.co.uk or call 0141 302 6555.