Residents in Ivinghoe are celebrating thanks to a £49,780 Big Lottery Fund award for a project to breathe new life into a vital community hub.
The project is one of four awards totalling over £166,000 made yesterday under the fund’s Village SOS scheme, which aims to help country communities that may be struggling with issues such as isolation and the closure of local amenities, through supporting them to run community enterprises.
Save Our School SOS Ivinghoe – Old School Community Hub will use the funding to develop their new community hub within the village’s old Victorian school.
The new building will provide a multi-purpose activities room, kitchen and cafe area, and an IT room for start-up businesses and IT training. Opening up valuable opportunities for skills learning such as IT training and business start-up facilities, the scheme will also include mum and baby groups, yoga, lunch clubs for older residents and a theatre club, providing a wide range of training in stagecraft and production.
The scheme will also generate an income through rental of the activity space, cafe area, and charges for use of the IT room to enable the enterprise to become self sustainable.
Carol Tarrant, chairman of Ivinghoe SOS, said: “The award from the Big Lottery Fund is an enabler and a confidence booster, as it will triumphantly kick start our community-led refurbishment and equipping of Ivinghoe’s Old Victorian School building into our vibrant new Community Hub, a place to halve our isolation and double our happiness!
Simply congregating in our new cafe and taking part in activities for all generations, wherein we explore creating new communication channels for ourselves building resilience to keep us more hopeful well into the future!”
Cafe on the Rec enterprise in Drayton Parslow has also struck lucky. It received more than £23,000 for a project to renovate the kitchen area of the local sports club and set up a community cafe to give the village community a social venue to meet up and enjoy a coffee and a chat. The enterprise will generate funds for self sustainability through sales of coffee shop products.
Sacha Rose-Smith, of the Big Lottery Fund, said: “These fantastic projects show what can be achieved when a community pulls together towards a single goal. With the rural way of life under threat from various factors, Village SOS has provided vital support for all sorts of community-run social enterprises.”