Revd David Keen, Vicar at St Peter’s, Yeovil shares how the support they offer from their community centre is making a difference.
Where is your community centre?
The St Peter’s Community Centre is in Westfield in Yeovil. It was built in 2019 to replace an old church hall, riddled with asbestos. The church partnered with local community association and others to build it.
What was your hope for Centre?
Our vision when we built the centre was that it would make a tangible difference to Westfield, the centre of which was identified as one of the 10% most deprived areas in the country in the 2011 census. There is lots of deprivation, low levels of skills and literacy and health challenges.
What does the centre offer?
When we reopened after Covid and the cost-of-living crisis hit, as a management committee we recognised we had a facility that had three different meeting spaces, a door into the church and a café area in the centre. The idea of Warm Hubs was being floated and we realised it was an obvious thing to use the centre for. We now open four days a week, employ a cook and provide free drinks and lunches. We already had a pop-up library, free wifi, a couple of regular community coffee mornings, and a school uniform rail in the Centre. So we beefed up the children zone in the church, collected donations of games and jigsaws, and added a winter coat rail. With free lunches and hot drinks all day, that was enough of an offer to sort of entice people, make it worth them coming in, to get warm, to get free food, to have company. We already had several groups and support services in the centre, including a mental health café, a job club, art for dementia, so it wasn’t a massive stretch to build on that.
How did you fund it?
We had been given £14,000 from South Somerset Council for ‘Food resilience’ in Westfield, with no strings attached. They had some grant funding left over and knew of some of the stuff we were doing and asked if we could use that money. We didn’t know how we were going to use it but we knew we could find a way to put it to good use. That gave us the start-up funds, and we’ve secured other grants since then, through Somerset Community Foundation, and a local housing association, among others.
Are you doing it this winter?
We launched beginning of November 2022 and because of getting the other funding from various sources we kept going throughout the year and recently celebrated our first anniversary. We should be able to keep running at least through the first half of 2024.
How else do you support your community?
As well as the Warm Hub, which operates from Monday to Thursday, we also set up a community pantry that runs on a Friday. It’s run as a membership scheme - people pay £3.50 to get roughly £35 worth of food each week. Because they can be members up to six months, we can build a relationship with the members - get to know what their needs are and signpost them to support. We support about 25 households in this way. They can stay and eat at the café so there is emotional support as well as food poverty support. There is also a mini pantry for those who have already done six months. They can stay on the books but get a slightly smaller offering of food.
How is the church involved?
The centre is run by a sub-committee of the PCC that includes people from the community association, Abri Housing, and from the church.
The PCC has delegated the full running of the centre to a sub-committee, which I co-chair. There is a weighting towards the church, but it is run as an open-access centre. Folk from the church just volunteer, make themselves available for different things, sit on the welcome desk, run a coffee morning and just be available. It’s about being hospitable, getting to know folk as they use the centre and be the welcome team. We don’t have to put on lots of extra church activities to do outreach, just be available and be hospitable.
Who else uses the centre?
We have a Happy Café other week, run by local health coaches, the housing association run a job club which provides employment support, CVs, applications, job searching things like that, the Village Agents come in and do their Social Prescribing stuff, there is an Art for Dementia Group – so lots of different support groups and agencies that come in and use the centre – and we are just there. It’s just great! I don’t have to do anything, I just come in and look around benignly.
Was there a lot of work in setting it up?
It was a lot of work building the centre, it took one to two days a week of my time for a couple of years to actually raise the money and get it designed. We ran it as a management committee for the first couple of months but then decided to appoint a centre manager. The centre manager does the day-to-day operational stuff, management committee meets every 6-8 weeks to review things. If she has a good idea – which she does every couple of weeks – she just runs it past the management committee or has a chat with me. Our churchwardens at St Peter’s are very good and do a lot of on the ground liaison. I just make sure I am there once or twice a week just to pick up bits as they happen but there is a lot of good lay leadership in the church and in the community and we leave Marie to do her job of running the centre. I let people get on with it.
Initially a lot of the ideas and vision of how the centre was going to work – there were two or three of us saying, how about we have a library, how about we have a training space, how about we have... but it has gone well beyond any ideas I could have now, which is great!
Are you realising your vision?
We are seeing signs of it coming to fruition. Before the cost-of-living crisis hit we were a centre that ran lots of different activities during the week that people would come in for, but now we have the warm hub, people come to just see ‘what’s going on today?’, or ‘I’ll go and get a drink’, or ‘I’ll go and chat to somebody’.
In an average week, we are getting 70-90 people coming in for meals or drinks, and an equal number said they were coming for the company as for the free food. Even in the summer people value it as a community centre, so we’ve kept it running all year and there hasn’t been a drop off in numbers. When you add the Community Pantry, the job club, and all the other support groups, the Centre is supporting 200-300 people a week.
Any advice for someone who is looking to do this where they are?
Our venue is brand-new and purpose built so we know we are are in a good position, but if you can find a venue there is funding available, either from parish/county councils, or places like Somerset Community Foundation or Housing associations. Referencing initiatives like our Warm Hub or others may be helpful, for example, saying, ‘Here are some ideas we are trying to put into practice in our neighbourhood.’
We found the consistent offer of free food and drink was a draw and we find the food pays for itself. Having a good cook helps, but you need a good team in order to deliver this. We have the advantage of having volunteers both from the church and the community to be front of house, so I would say ‘don’t do it on your own!’. Find other groups in your community who have the same care and the same idea and say, ‘How can we do this together?’.
A shorter version of this interview appeared in the January 2024 issue of the Manna mailing.