As anyone who has passed the Village Hall recently can see, it’s been a hive of activity: the fence and wall were installed at the end of March, making the rockface safe and secure. This has all been thanks to the generous people of Ackleton and beyond sponsoring bricks to make the project financially viable and to our willing volunteers, who came and laboured for the bricklayers to make the work go faster. The project has very nearly raised enough money to be entirely self-funding: 923 out of the 1200 bricks have been sponsored (including a very generous donation from the Ackleton Community Group – ACG) and it would be great to make it to the 1000 mark before the campaign finishes at the end of April. If you would like to sponsor some bricks, please complete the form that came through your letterbox a few weeks ago and either email the Trustees on ackletonvillagehalltrustees@hotmail.com or drop it in at 47 Folley Road. Remember that if you are taxpayer, we can claim a further 25% on top of your donation if you fill out the Gift Aid declaration on the form; if you forgot to do that at the time, get in touch and we can add your details.
We are pleased to have sourced the bricks for the wall from the Reuse Hub in Wolverhampton; for anyone who hasn’t come across their work, they are an organisation which accepts donations of surplus materials from the construction industry and sells them at vastly reduced prices to the public and to community charities. We were also fortunate to receive a £100 grant from them towards our project. You can see their work and maybe bag yourselves some bargain DIY materials here Reuse Hub and they’re on Facebook too.
Meanwhile, inside the hall, the necessary safety checks have been going ahead: the work needed to meet fire compliance is virtually complete, the boiler and fire extinguishers have been serviced, and PAT testing has been carried out. A survey of the drains has been commissioned, and we are awaiting the report from the full electrical survey, which we know will have a list of remedial tasks but hopefully nothing too major. Thank you to Mark for giving his time free of charge – we are very grateful! Once the results of all the assessments are in, we will be in a better position to give an idea of when the hall will be ready to reopen, which we know is the question on everyone’s lips!
We are delighted to let you know that we were successful in our application to the Telford and Shropshire Support Fund (a charity which supports community groups with reduced income) for a grant towards our costs in meeting compliance – they awarded us £1000 to help meet the costs of the assessments. As we said at the meeting back in January, not all of our intended projects need to be complete for the hall to reopen so our focus for the time being is on the essentials and it is hoped that we can work towards the other items on our list over the next few months – it would be great to refurbish the toilets to include accessible facilities and to upgrade the lighting but more fundraising will be required before we can start. We have a few more grant applications ongoing so hopefully more news of those in our next update…
Now that the rockface is secure we can invite more volunteers into the hall to help prepare for the reopening – if you volunteered to be on the cleaning and sorting crew, watch your inbox for an invitation to join a working party – many mops make light work!
The next village meeting will now be able to take place in the hall itself:
ACKLETON VILLAGE HALL PUBLIC MEETING
Tuesday May 6th at 7pm
Ackleton Village Hall
As always, we thank you for your support – it has been so good to see the village pull together to get the wall built. Not long now!
The Trustees