Spring is here at Community Chesterfield and the garden is blooming!

Wow, it has been a busy and exciting start to the New Year! We all feel as if we have been planting a garden since April – digging the soil and getting the seeds in. Since the New Year all our flowers seem to have come up at once! Excuse the metaphor, we have in reality been working hard meeting people, finding out how our project can work with different groups and support them in the most effective ways however since the New Year we have been able to deliver such a lot and the fruits of our labours have become obvious. Here are just a few:

Community Groups have asked us for space within the University for their activities and our free room now has three different groups using it regularly.

Groups have asked us for help spreading their stories within the student community and we have been recruiting student ambassadors for this purpose. Despite uptake being slow one student ambassador has not only promoted the work of Nenna Kind, but also helped them out with some of their knotty problems.

We have found many groups have interesting research projects waiting for someone to work at them, and have linked up three lecturers with two groups to take this work forwards.

We have established a weekly ‘Community Corner’ to give community groups space to engage with students and staff at the university. This has been popular with both groups and students, with the Guide Dog, Demi, being a star attraction and her owner having some great conversations. The Asian Association too, brought saris for people to try on. We will be working to build on the successes of Community Corner going forwards.

Volunteer Managers have asked for more networking and peer support, so the first volunteer manager peer support group will be meeting on Thursday 12th March.

Community groups have asked for more men working within the sector to support service users, so on the 31st of March we will be holding an exciting event to break down barriers to men pursuing careers in Health and Social Care.

Community groups have asked for support with marketing, emergency first aid, and volunteer management amongst other topics, and we have delivered high quality training, for free, to groups on these topics. So far we have trained 41 individuals, working across 21 different voluntary sector groups, totalling 274 hours of training.

We are also working creatively and strategically to support groups to save money, improve resilience and strengthen their organisations, consequentially we have been asking groups about new ways of shared working. We hosted a very successful workshop with 45 attendees to discuss ideas around having a shared space in Chesterfield to enhance the work of groups.

I’m so excited there’s so much fruitful work happening and am looking forward to sharing more with you as it continues to blossom.