|
|
|
David Lawrence reports on another winner in the 2005 Community Project Awards, sponsored by Congregational Insurance
It is a commonplace today to say that buildings can be a burden. Indeed it sometimes seems that the church spends so much time complaining about the crumbling legacy left by previous generations that we have lost sight of the opposite side of the coin. To own a building is a remarkable privilege, for buildings are places where things can happen. Very few clubs and societies own buildings. They rent or borrow facilities where they can and shape their activities around whatever is available – if anything. Time and again churches seeking to make a difference have found themselves able to do so for the simple reason that they had a place of their own in which to turn vision into reality.
dust and low expectations In Ebbsfleet, a relatively small community near the M25, just south of the Thames and close by the prestigious Bluewater shopping centre, there was no community building. That was, admittedly, one of the least of the community’s problems. Ebbsfleet and its surrounding communities are a far cry from the traditional picture of Kentish life. Traditionally,
this area of North Kent was best known for the quarrying of chalk. Chalk
and a huge cement factory meant a very low skill base and a film of
white dust over everything. In an era of tighter regulation the dust may
have gone but the low expectations remain. The area has one of the
lowest rates for young people going on to university in the country and
scores highly on all the indexes of deprivation. There is a perception
locally that it is the kind of place from which people who can, leave. To the historical problems, more recent years have added less traditional ones such as a notorious local high rise development – a concrete semi-circle of blocks, reminiscent of a prison, each block labelled with a letter rather than being dignified with a name – which has contributed to high crime rates locally. The story is told of the installation of a new and sophisticated security system intended to control casual access and crime. The contractors, having finished installing the system on the ground floor, moved on to the first – by the time they came back down the ground floor had been stripped and the equipment taken away to be sold. On another occasion a local Anglican priest was narrowly missed by a refrigerator thrown from an upstairs balcony.
Throw into the mix the impending creation of thousands of homes for London commuters, part of the Thames Gateway development, plus the creation of a new infrastructure with the arrival of a major new station to connect Eurostar passengers to the rest of the transport system and you have one of the poorest communities in the country staring across the valley at the face of the new Britain from which many of them feel excluded.
local outreach
The work at Ebbsfleet began as an outreach of Wood Street Methodist church. In 1991 they opened up the work to ecumenical partners and the Northfleet Churches’ Neighbourhood Centre was born – a modest project which ran until the year 2000, by which time the small Methodist congregation had ceased to meet. Then in 2000, with a grant from a local trust to upgrade the toilets, multiplied by match funding from the EU, a new and more ambitious phase began. With backing from local Anglican, Roman Catholic, Methodist and United Reformed congregations, the Ebbsfleet Rainbow Centre was born.
Built in the 1870s, the small chapel building which houses the centre has an unimposing exterior. Inside, the facilities are modest compared to many community centres. The building is divided into two floors. Downstairs is a hall with recently refurbished kitchen and a small office, upstairs another hall has a small partitioned meeting / computer room jutting out from one wall. But the modest nature of the facilities belies the ambition of the project which occupies them.
bewildering range
The range of activities which fills the centre in an average week is, quite literally, bewildering. There is a Carer and Toddler group; a UK Online centre offers computer training; the local youth offending team run reparation sessions with young offenders; the Walk Tall scheme supports young people excluded from school; the Council for Voluntary Services run a range of courses; there is a regular ‘Networking Lunch’ bringing together representatives of voluntary and statutory groups in the area; there are healthy living courses; the local council use the centre on occasion for public meetings; there are meetings of the highly successful local history group which the centre helped to set up; there are brass band and jazz band rehearsals; Rainbows and Brownies meet weekly and the building has been used to run local Alpha courses.
That kind of level of usage does not come easily or cheaply. The centre enjoys the contributions of 60 volunteers and now has a team of five paid staff, soon to be reconfigured to include a youth and children’s worker. But it was not always so. In 2001 when project director Anne Jenkins was taken on as volunteer co-ordinator – then the sole member of staff – she recalls both the sense of challenge and a very real nervousness at working alone in the area until all hours. Anne began to advertise and visit local churches, encouraging people to come along. Potential volunteers would come for a ‘taster’ session, enjoy the experience and come back next time with a friend. Her other tactic was ‘networking’ or, to put it more colloquially, pushing her nose in everywhere. The current SureStart booking arose because Anne heard the scheme was starting in the area and ensured that she was placed on the consultation panel. It is a tactic that has paid off with other activities – being in early on the discussions and ensuring that everyone concerned knows about the centre’s potential contribution.
A former special needs teacher, Anne is a member of St Paul’s URC, Gravesend, an elder and former church secretary who came along to the centre to help with washing up and found it very happy place. She only learned about the new Volunteer Co-ordinator job after applications had formally closed and had but a single night to make up her mind. She prayed for guidance, asking ‘is this for me?’. The answer, she recalls with a laugh, seemed to be ‘Go for it, and if you get the job you’ll know it is!’ Three days later she had a new job.
ambitious plans
Anne’s drive and energy have clearly been crucial in the centre’s growing success, but that success itself brings new challenges. ‘It’s just snowballed – and I think sometimes the management committee wish I hadn’t worked so hard.’
It is the kind of comment that can be heard in projects all around the country which have grown perhaps even beyond their initial expectations. With growing staff and facilities comes a growing budget – the centre has gone from an initial budget of £3,000 to around £100,000 today. Inevitably, fund raising becomes more and more crucial. At Ebbsfleet every effort is made to make the building pay for itself through the income that accompanies many lettings but there is still a large funding gap. Now the Centre is looking to the future as a company limited by guarantee and a charity in its own right, with the ambitious title Ebbsfleet Rainbow Centres – reflecting the ambition to run several sites in the area.
Much of that vision comes from Peter Welsh, a softly-spoken Scot who fills the role of Community Minister in the area. Peter arrived some 10 years ago as the local URC minister and has been involved with the Centre, where he now serves as chair of the board, all along. As grant funding becomes ever tighter, Peter is clear that the future lies with social enterprise – providing activities that generate funds to pay for the organization. His current idea is to run a food co-operative, providing fresh fruit and vegetables at low prices, which would fit well with the centre’s understated emphasis on healthy living in all its aspects.
Not least of those aspects is spiritual health and it is an area where all those involved admit there is still much work to be done. Though the project is unashamedly Christian in its ethos, and visitors relish the traditional Christian touches like the grace before the regular Thursday lunches, a prayer diary is widely circulated and there are plans for informal worship alongside a snack lunch – Prayer and Ploughman’s in the summer, Soup and Spirit in the winter – all concerned seem to recognize that there is further to go in finding the right balance between an open welcome and staying close to their Christian roots.
Alongside that common concern, question of ‘ownership’ by local churches is one that frequently raises itself in long-term ecumenical projects and there is a constant effort to maintain the enthusiasm and commitment of local Christians. In areas where commitment is anyway in short supply it is often doubly difficult to raise much enthusiasm among local churches for giving away potential workers and, especially, leaders. Paradoxically the arrival of new commuter homes, while highlighting the deprivation of many long-term residents, may provide an infusion of professional skills which could benefit local churches and projects like the centre.
But though the centre is very much an ecumenical enterprise, the URC can be proud of its input. The former Wood Street Methodist Church gave birth to the centre but local minister Peter Clark – who, along with URC members, raised nearly £500 in a gruelling sponsored bike ride in the weekend following Reform’s visit – is very clear that were it not for the fact that elderly volunteers from Northfleet URC took the needs of the centre to heart in a special way, it would not be where it is today.
making a difference
For those who do come as leaders and volunteers, however, there is the satisfaction of knowing that their work makes a difference. Whether it is seeing the change in unemployed volunteers who discover new talents and move on to employment, the enthusiasm of a new generation of ‘silver-surfers’, parents finding mutual support at the Toddler Club or the regulars at the Thursday lunches, the Rainbow Centre is clearly a place where people find a welcome. And though the workers may come from near and far, the effect is to create a place which belongs uniquely to the community and is helping to put the heart back into that community – not a bad use for a building which in other places might have been cast off as ‘redundant’.
|
The 2005 Community Project Awards are
sponsored by
|
.gif){kind=logo}
