Long Lee and Thwaites Brow Village Hall
I’m Jane Bowen, one of the trustees at Long Lee and Thwaites Brow Village Hall. Here’s a photo of our hall taken on the day of our community party and where we celebrated Bradford City of Culture. We created this together.
It is important that our hall is a warm and welcoming community space for everyone.
We were a new organisation when I first heard I’d got a place on the CLWY group. I wasn’t sure how helpful or relevant the sessions would be, being one from just a handful of organisations attending that were run entirely by a voluntary group. The hall’s income is sourced from fund raising and grants.
The CLWY sessions were welcoming, and we would cover the topics I needed to know about. Some of these were:-
- how to pick your target group
- how to assess success
- how to write smart goals and pick effective strategies to deliver them.
Most of all, how to use the underpinning theories we explored in our weekly sessions, in our organisation along with how we could become a charity. Back in the hall we worked our way through all the policies and procedures we needed to build an effective organisation, explored the ways a charity can operate, and the different mechanisms to enable this. It helped our application process so now the hall is a registered charity.
Being able to share with fellow trustees how to negotiate a CAT transfer was used to understand about process within negotiations with our local council. From a trustee perspective, we effectively challenged our Local Authority when they declined to discuss a Community Asset Transfer with us. Through the CLWY programme I was put in touch with community leaders who faced similar issues. This was incredibly helpful.
As trustees we have all learned that tenacity is important, and now, we can return to our prime focus; delivering local services. Our aim, to build services and support designed to be inclusive and make our village safer. The charity can now focus on how best to work on what the community wants. This sounds an easy task, but is a huge challenge.
At the same time we’ve continued our traditional fund raising. Here we are at Yorkshire Day in Lund Park, Keighley.
In summary the CLWY programme provided knowledge and built confidence in our ability to run our organisation. It enabled us to become a charity, to progress a CAT transfer of our building, and to challenge appropriately when our local council struggled to work with us.
