00:00I'm Lucy. I'm Will. And we are at Swinnow Community Centre. Two years ago we got the opportunity to
00:07take over Swinnow Community Centre and it was a bit of a strange encounter really. It was about
00:13to close and we were just moving into the area and we'd already thought let's do something
00:18community work-wise from you know that's what we wanted to do and so we got involved here and
00:23everything has changed in the last two years. I remember being here two years ago and just gutting
00:28the place and emptying out everything and you know having a bit of a restart and slowly
00:32starting to build team and so it really was a fresh start for the centre and for the community.
00:38The first thing we did was do a community needs assessment and we got about 80 different households
00:45to tell us what they felt the community centre should deliver for them. We took those responses,
00:53we collected the data, created a plan and that plan was to create community cohesion, get people
00:59together to provide great youth work and to build local skills and give opportunity for local people
01:06and that developed in our vision which is to provide hope for the local area, to serve the community
01:11and to love local people. Seeing people come and find a home here and a place to serve and a
01:17place to
01:17use their skills has been so rewarding and our volunteer team are incredible. They're absolutely
01:22amazing so but seeing people that feel that they haven't had a purpose in life or that you know
01:26that they are just a bit lost at the minute to come and put Swinno t-shirt on and get
01:30stuck in and
01:31we've had just incredible yeah stories really of lives transformed just through coming and getting
01:37involved as a volunteer team. Yeah that's been ace. And we see about a thousand people a month come
01:43through the doors whether that's toddlers or tired parents or coffee drinkers to the cafe on a Thursday.
01:50Just see people come together eat food and yeah be in community and I think that's that's what the
01:57community really thirsted for was that a space to come and gather and to meet people eat together.
02:04We come here on a regular basis we use the cafe a lot it's really important that we patronise it
02:12because
02:12it's doing a great job in the local community there's lots of different activities that go on
02:19but we obviously being a little picker we need our breakfasts we've got friends in there with people
02:24that we wouldn't have automatically got friends with I mean it's just it's just a lovely atmosphere.
02:28We're throwing a summer of sport on for local children we've got lots more big community events
02:34to look forward to in the autumn and the winter term but we are having a refreshed focus to increase
02:40our kind of impact which will focus on how we support local mental health people have told us
02:46that's a gap in local provision so we're looking at how we can help people in that respect putting
02:52the community heart back into the local area is what we're passionate about and seems to be working at the
02:58minute.
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