The Yes movement was characterised by the thousands of people who campaigned and joined the myriad of pro-independence groups which sprang into existence in the run-up to the referendum. With a total of around 350 organisations, it was dubbed the biggest grassroots movement in Scottish political history.

Here, one year on, we look at where some of these groups are now, with members reflecting on their campaigning.

WOMEN FOR INDEPENDENCE

It began in April 2012 as a campaign to ensure that the voices of women would be heard in the independence debate. Now Women for Independence (WFI) is a national organisation, which has around 50 local groups in existence. Since setting up a formal membership scheme in February 2015 it has attracted 1000 members.

In the wake of the referendum, the group has been campaigning on issues such as how to improve the criminal justice system for women and setting up school uniform banks to help disadvantaged families.

Carolyn Leckie, co-founder and member of WFI national committee, said the group had its biggest meeting following the referendum, which was attended by 1000 women who were determined to keep WFI going.

She said WFI had played a crucial role in gaining more support for independence – but the greater achievement was the politicisation of “thousands of women up and down the country”.

“The reverberations of that are still showing through – more and more women are joining and getting involved in politics in their own communities,” she added.

She said: “Another referendum is inevitable, it is just a matter of time. But we have still not really had the post-mortem on what we could have done better.

“It is important that everyone who was involved in the independence campaign - particularly the wider movement and the grassroots groups - should be getting together to discuss what might have made it more likely to have resulted in a yes vote."

Corinne Durand, a member of the organising committee for WFI East Renfrewshire, said her life had changed after getting involved in WFI and becoming politically active for the first time.

“The referendum was a really special time and a time where I felt I was part of history in a way,” she said.

“Even though the result itself was not what we would have hoped for, it has been fantastic for people to become involved in politics and think about what is important and what they want for their country.”

NATIONAL COLLECTIVE

The group of artists and creatives supporting the Yes campaign engaged thousands of people, organised petitions and embarked on a tour taking the pro-independence message to communities from the Borders to Shetland. It was supported by some of Scotland’s most prominent artists – such as Alasdair Gray and Liz Lochhead - and aimed to engage people from all walks of life with the mission of 'Imagining a better Scotland'.

On May 1 this year, organisers announced National Collective had shut up shop saying “it belongs to a time and a place, and that moment has passed”.

Co-founder Ross Colquhoun, who is now working as a strategist for the SNP, said: “Although the Yes movement didn’t achieve its primary goal of Scottish independence, we made substantial progress against all of the odds.

“It’s not really for me to say what our achievements were, but National Collective has been credited with contributing towards the referendum’s legacy of high levels of political engagement and creating innovative forms of political campaigning.

“When we launched National Collective we had no idea that it would grow to have such prominence. Where I think we succeeded was by offering a form of participation in politics that was accessible to all.”

Author and playwright Alan Bissett, who was a cultural ambassador for National Collective, said the group had brought a colour and energy to the campaign as an “intersection between politics and creativity”.

“A lot of people in the artistic community were Yes and National Collective provided a kind of lightning rod we could all rally round,” he said. “That particular collective was about a specific issue, so there was no point continuing.

“The next referendum could be 20 years from now – there will be writers and painters and theatre makers who are in primary school at the moment who will look back on what we did and say we could do that.”

RADICAL INDEPENDENCE

The conference from which the Radical Independence Campaign (RIC) emerged attracted around 1000 people in 2012. Two months after the referendum, three times that number attended another conference held by the movement, which promotes a left-wing vision of independence. The next major RIC gathering is expected to take place in spring next year.

Co-founder Cat Boyd said they had been taken aback at the time at the size of the first conference, which she described as the “biggest meeting of the radical and socialist left in Scotland for a long time”.

“We needed to put forward a left-wing voice to say this (independence) isn’t about the SNP, it is about breaking from Westminster’s neo-liberal consensus,” she said. “We want to build this broad support – the appetite was there and the momentum just seemed to keep building and building.

“It was never a membership organisation, but there were thousands of people involved in RIC all across Scotland.”

Boyd said one of the most important aspect of the campaign was canvassing in communities that had been “ignored by Westminster and Holyrood for decades”.

“It was reaching out to people that had been shunned by a political system, who felt they had no voice and no-one to speak up for them – organising that and building that into a movement across Scotland was definitely the most important thing we did,” she said.

While Boyd and some other members of RIC have now set up the new left-wing political party RISE, she emphasised she was still a member of RIC, which is a separate entity and will continue.

“There is one direction of travel here, independence is going to happen, but we need to make sure the next time the referendum comes round there is still a multitude of voices arguing for it,” she added.

Duncan McCabe, an organiser with Dundee RIC, said: “RIC is about independence and building a people’s Scotland - it is important we have an organisation like that which exists outwith the party political structures.”

GENERATION YES

The grassroots youth movement which hoped to galvanise a generation into voting Yes had branches across the country and undertook a bus tour as part of efforts to persuade 16-25 year olds to back independence. Many members have since joined political parties, but the group is continuing as Our Generation Scotland, which aims to encourage youth participation in politics in Scotland.

Morgan Horn, 19, who was a member of Generation Yes and is now the president of Glasgow University’s Scottish Nationalist Association (Gusna) and national vice-convener of SNP Students, said: “We succeeded in moving politics away from the corridors of Westminster with middle-aged men in suits - we succeeded in bringing it to the streets and to young people.

“That is something I think the referendum will always be remembered for. Although we lost the referendum, we were definitely on the right side of history.”

She added: “People have realised the only way we can make effective change is if we shout as loud as we can for it.

“It is something we have continued to do and almost every young person that I knew who was involved from either side of the campaign has continued to do.”

Saffron Dickson, 17, who was one of the first members of Generation Yes, has also taken up a role with the SNP’s student wing as national equalities coordinator – but she believes the cross-party Generation Yes was an ideal model to engage young people in the referendum debate.

She said: “The first time I spoke about the referendum [after the vote] ... was only a couple of months ago, as it was too sore until then. For a long time it was a banned subject for me.

“It took a long time for me to see the positives come out of it and see the attitude change we made, without actually having the change we wanted.

“We made a lot of difference, achieved so many things and it is something to be proud of.”

BUSINESS FOR SCOTLAND

In the run-up to the referendum, the group aiming to highlight the advantages of independence to the business community held a sell-out conference attended by around 200 people and launched a Vision for Scotland – a 50 page document on Scotland’s economy which was downloaded more than 20,000 times. It now has more than 4,000 members – including 1,000 who signed up in the wake of the referendum - and is one of the key lobbying voices for the business community.

Gordon MacIntyre-Kemp, founder and chief executive of Business for Scotland (BfS), said the focus of the group was on championing what independence could do for small-to-medium size businesses and growing Scotland’s economic prosperity and confidence.

He said: “It was all about opening people’s eyes to the opportunities (of independence). We just happen to think independence is the best way to govern and create such an economy – so independence is a means to an end for us and therefore carrying on (BfS) just made absolute sense.

“While there is no referendum to campaign for right now, we will campaign for more powers and we will campaign and lobby for the policies that will drive Scotland’s economy forward until such time as we get a chance again to campaign for independence.”

Gillian O’Neil, co-founder of creative digital agency 29studios, who volunteered to become a board member of BfS after working with the group during the referendum, said the group’s current campaigns included promoting the living wage and youth development.

“We recently had an event about the BfS commitment to the living wage attended by a whole raft of businesses from across industries – from construction to retail," she said.

“BfS is trying to encourage companies to value the assets in your business - which is your people. We have clear evidence that when you do pay a good salary and create a good culture and reward your people, you get it back ten-fold.”