THE Pride of East Lancashire is a campaign of recognition. We believe it's high time that the wonderful achievements of hundreds of extraordinary East Lancastrians were fully acknowledged.

Our community awards will pay tribute to our outstanding voluntary workers and organisations, fantastic amateur sport contributors - as well as local people who have simply demonstrated unbelievable courage often in life or death situations.

Our appeal to you is to help us in our quest in the coming weeks by nominating YOUR choices in our award categories. This is a unique opportunity to give East Lancashire's unsung heroes the recognition they deserve so please help us to help them.

Beyond saluting our many community heroes we also want to throw a giant spotlight on to East Lancashire's special strengths: its unique character, booming businesses, great sports and entertainment stars ... and not forgetting the wonderful countryside which envelopes our towns and villages.

The people of this area have a warmth and sense of decency which few other parts of the country can match. Perhaps that is the thing we should be most proud of. But we've also got ability by the lorry load: our achievers and achievements bear testament to that.

We excel in all sorts of areas but we seem to struggle a little when it comes to recognising these strengths and successes. And when we do acknowledge them, traditional Lancashire modesty and self deprecation sometimes stops us from telling others about our abilities and what we have to offer.

It's time we stood up to be counted, to tell investors that this is a great place for business, to tell our MPs to battle even harder for our causes, and yes, to remind OURSELVES that we have a lot to be proud of and passionate about.

Make no mistake - this campaign doesn't mean we've suddenly descended into cloud cuckoo land. East Lancashire has many difficulties to overcome, myriad challenges which need to be met, social and economic changes which must be made.

This newspaper - whilst recognising the numerous successes that ARE being achieved in the region - will continue to highlight those difficulties and challenges. We will continue to criticise where necessary.

But accentuating the positive is also vital and we believe the Pride of East Lancashire campaign has the potential to be a catalyst for generating greater optimism which in turn can itself be a powerful agent for action.

With the help of East Lancashire Partnership and our other sponsors - all of whom deserve huge recognition for rallying to the East Lancashire cause - we'll be trying in the coming months to help fire that optimism..