The Vench Part 1 - Bristol CRF

Good afternoon. Could you state the name of your community interest company and what you provide to the community? Hello, um, the community, uh, company I represent is The Bench, Loch Les Youth and Play Space. We are managed by Groundwork South, which is a national charity. Oh, OK, so rather than community interest company, it's a charity

Charity. OK, fantastic. Um, so you applied for the Community Resilience Fund and you were successful in being allocated a portion of funding, which is great

What have you spent the money on? Um, we built a new cafe at the front of our building, and this is a cafe to support the community and our service users. It does not impact the play equipment or the playground that we have here at The Ven. It is purely for public use, um, and it's been brilliant

Excellent. Um, and what difference has this funding made to the staff here and the wider community? Um, so the funding was used for the capital development, so it was an underused area at the front of our site. It had some conifers, a conifer hedge that had overgrown

And it was costing us about 1000 pounds a year to basically um manage this part of our playground. Um, so we removed the Leylandia trees and we um excavated and installed a new. A shipping container that's been refurbished, 2 shipping containers side by side, OK, 20 ft each to basically serve the public

Wow, that's a lot of work. Yeah, um, shipping containers are becoming more popular these days. I've seen them, yeah, in cafes

Uh, excellent. How did you find the application form? How did you find filling it out and the whole process? It, it, it's, it was a long time ago. But the application was straightforward and we had great support from the um from the team within the council

OK, excellent. What made you apply specifically for the resilience fund for this grant opportunity in in uh specifically? That's a good question. We apply for funding every day, but the resilience funding came um and we thought how can this organization become more resilient in the face of changing funding landscapes

Um, and creating an avenue by which we can, um, increase our unrestricted income, so something that's not related to a project would be beneficial. So basically the cafe project will be paying rent into the vent site and to support what we do here already. OK

For the children and young people of Block Es. Alright, excellent. What has impacted the delivery of your project, so from filling out the forms, receiving the funding, and then delivering the upgrades or the changes, um, have you had any setbacks or issues? So from the moment we applied for the Community Infrastructure community resilience funding

Um, the costs of, uh, construction materials went up, the cost of labor went up, so our cost for the project overall increased, um, which meant we had to seek out further funding. We were very lucky to secure further funding which enabled us to complete the project. Um, but it did take a little bit more searching than, uh, just applying for the Community Resilience fund

So yes, that was one of the setbacks and the other one was the fact that er the strip of land that we were proposing to develop, um, was not part of our lease. So we worked with the council and the council work within with different departments within um to basically secure us a tenancy at will for that and yeah, they're very helpful. OK, excellent, that's great

Um, so when you needed to seek out more funding, you needed to seek out more funding outside of the resilience fund, yeah, yeah. Did, did you request more funding from them? Not from, not from, OK. Um, excellent

Have your future er sorry, have your future plans changed since receiving the grant? Our plans change all the time, but for that particular project we are still um our timelines moved a little bit um so we were hoping that we'd be open for summer holidays. We did a soft launch but we weren't quite ready to recruit and appoint a new member of staff for that project, so we are now um undergoing recruitment and hopefully uh things will be in place. The timeline has changed and potentially um, Yeah, other, the, it will have to flex within what we do already

OK, excellent. Uh, if you hadn't received, um, the grant, where would your organization be? What would you have done? Uh, we probably would be looking at managing those trees again, so we'd be spending more money to look after the trees and that area of the playground which was within our fence line but not within our boundary, we would still be looking after it and it would be an overgrown mess. Right, OK, excellent

So er time to dream big. If money was no object, what would your priority be for the future, where would you like to take this organization or charity? Uh, if money was absolutely no object, so just dream is ridiculous big. Hm

Lockleighs is a changing community and we, um, we work with children and young people and what we would love to see for them is contact with people who are inspirational to them, so artists, um, people who make things, people who, Uh, build things and we wanted to, we explored the idea of having another story to this building so that we could have a massive art studio, a movement studio, something for the children and young people to be able to come after school and drop in and feel inspired by artists in residence. Um, so yeah, we're dreaming big, we're looking at the playground being a bit more dangerous and a bit more risky, um, but also having unlimited amounts of staff to be able to inspire these children and young people because that's, that's what's needed at that tender moment in life. Yeah, excellent

Uh, was there anything different or unique about the resilience fund application or process compared with other funding, um, that you may have sought out? Um, I, personally, I enjoyed the peer to peer support, um, the fact that we were all in it together, the fact that, um, Laura and Robin were holding the space for everybody to come in and. Ask questions and and uh you know, have have lots of additional questions. There was always space for additional questions

That was really, really unique about this. And the fact that they were open to just answering any one any one question, no matter how small. Excellent

And lastly, how do you feel about the community community resilience fund? Has it met your expectations and would you apply again if the opportunity arose? Well, I learnt a lot through the process. I believe there's a lot of organizational learning to be done from, from that particular process. We had, um, consultation with Wessel and with, uh, um, another developer who basically supported us to get the initial plans off the ground

Um, what, um, could you just repeat your question cos I've, I think I've, I've. Oh, it was just lastly, how do you feel about the community resilience Fund? Has it met your expectations and would you apply again if the opportunity rose? I would, I would apply, we would apply again, um, yes, we are very well rooted in the community and we feel we have something to offer and. If we can build our resilience or we're not depending on funding, then we can benefit more people

Brilliant, excellent. Um, did Wessell make any recommendations? They did, yeah, actually, and it was about the cafe and we implemented those recommendations. So it was about uh wheelchair access and they actually looked at the building at large, which was brilliant because this wasn't part of their scope, so

We looked at our accessibility for the whole building and for all our service users, not just for the cafe itself, so they extended their help wider than they needed to. Right, brilliant. Um, lastly, is there anything else you'd like to add or say? Um, I just wish it hadn't taken this long to get here and we could now have a coffee outside in the sunshine, but it's not sunny today so um yeah, huge thanks to the team and to um to the Community Resilience Fund team and the residency came together to vote for the project and the councilors and all those volunteer hours

I feel that we have come a long way and hopefully we'll have something really great to offer to the community and to passersbys next year. Um, that will then increase and support our resilience as an organization. Excellent, thank you, thank you so much

Can I just get your, um, logo on? Yeah, it's really nice, it's good. Thank you. Excellent

Thank you so much for your time. Oh no worries, thanks. Cheers, bye

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