CASH raised for the community will go back to the community.

That was the message from a fundraising committee which is looking for the best way to spend the money that was raised in an ambitious, but unsuccessful, scheme to get a disused Eastleigh swimming pool back into action.

The Shakespeare Community Pool Project worked for more than a decade to reopen a pool next to the Shakespeare Infant School on the Boyatt Wood estate.

But years of hard work and dedication were dashed when education chiefs decided to fill in the pool.

It meant about £30,000 in gifts to the £750,000 project were stuck in limbo.

Organisers of the pool project have since returned nearly half of their donations to the original contributors, including a donation from former Eastleigh mayor Councillor Maureen Sollitt, who split her original contribution of £10,000 from her year of office between theatre groups Centre Stage and the Eastleigh Youth Theatre.

With about £16,000 left to distribute, the committee asked for suggestions at a public meeting at Crestwood College.

Chairman Terry Holden-Brown said the committee would consider specific bids for the funds that met with two conditions.

"It must serve the local community, with an emphasis on health and fitness, and it should also be in commemoration of the pool project," he said.

Jane Field founded the group and spent 14 years fighting to get the pool reopened.

She said it had been very hard to let go of the project which had taken such a large part of her life.

She added: "My mother was part of the fundraisers who originally had the pool built at the end of the 1950s.

"It was a big community project and we now have to make sure the money goes back to a worthy cause and something that can serve the whole community, just as the pool would have," she said.

The committee has agreed on a deadline of May 1 for ideas to be submitted and will arrange a meeting in the weeks after to hand over donations to worthy causes.