2025 looks set to be a very busy year for Commonside! If 2024 were a hard slog, 2025 is showing the fruits of our labours!
Funding to improve the New Horizon Centre buildings
Notably, we have secured funding to improve the New Horizon Centre buildings. We have a grant payment offer of £150,000 from the Government’s VCSE Energy Efficiency Scheme and will be using this to replace windows and frames across the Centre. This will greatly reduce the leakage of heat from the building and we hope will help us to reduce our considerable energy bills. Work scheduled to take place at the same time inside the building, funded by Merton Council’s Neighbourhood Fund (from Community Infrastructure Levy) will enable us to renew the surface and structure of the stage in the Main Hall and replace the flooring. It will also stretch to replace the flooring in two other smaller halls, and the Dining Room, which is where our older users have their Lunch Club, and to upgrade the kitchen where we prepare this lunch. It’s taken some time to work through the conditions and checks to get this work started and it is due to start next week, so we are very excited and feel like we’ve really earned these improvements.
There will of course be some disruption but our customers have taken this with very good grace – we have moved some regular group bookings around to accommodate the work and just a handful of bookings have been suspended for either one week or two.
In succeeding to get this work going, we are very grateful to several officers in Merton Council who have done out of their way to help us to get to this point. You know who you are! THANK YOU!
You can come to our Centre Warming party when it’s all completed.
New Garden Plot
At the same time, as many of you will have seen, thanks to the support of Public Health Merton and the work of our friends at IdVerde, we have a new growing patch at the side-back of the Centre. It has raised beds in ‘H’ shape that can accommodate wheelchairs as well as a larger growing area than before, and an absolutely spending new gate that is easy to open and close and wide enough for mobility vehicles. The Garden Plot, as we call it, will be a place to site and enjoy plants and produce as well as for gardening and harvesting. Watch this space for more information about how to get involved.
Community Wellbeing Day, New Horizon Centre
Our main community event this month is the Community Wellbeing Day in the New Horizon Centre on 23rd January. A flyer and poster will go out next week, the event is free and all are very welcome.
Thank you to our friends in the Home Office team
We’d like to say a big thank you too to our friends in the Home Office team in Lunar House in Croydon who sorted kitchen equipment, a washing machine and tumble dryer, as well as a PAT-tested radiator, crockery and more and helped us to load it into a van to bring back to the Centre. Lunar House is closing as an office block and they were keen to make sure as much of the useable equipment as possible went to good causes – no small feat!
CEO Naomi has brought in more than £8.8 million!
And lastly, some figures to think about: it’s our CEO Naomi’s 20th year with the Commonside Trust this year and some quick calculations show that in her time leading Commonside she has brought in more than £8.8 million! Much of this has been from Merton Council, but equally, a large proportion was earned through renting rooms and hall spaces and from writing successful bids to non-statutory organisations. A miniscule <1% of this sum has come from NHS or health services funding, which is disappointing, and between 5-6% from Moat Homes Community Initiatives Fund. In its total it is hard-earned, well-deserved additional funding for Pollards Hill and surrounding areas.
