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Deepings Community Centre: At the heart of the community
Kirsty Lester, Pauline Redshaw, Jackie Boswell, Judith Heath-Brown, Alma Sheasby and Cathy Pridgeon. Photo supplied
CATHY Pridgeon, the chairman of the board of trustees at Deepings Community Centre in Market Deeping, has a simple tagline about how a centre should run: “If it’s safe, it’s clean, it’s warm and it’s friendly, it works.”
Those are not unique selling points, but the sheer breadth of usage at the centre is something special, as deputy features editor John Baker discovered:
AROUND 2,000 people use the Deepings Community Centre off Douglas Road every month, with numbers steadily climbing since it opened in 2000.
The IT lessons are extremely well-supported, to the point where six courses teaching computer-phobes the joy of eBay have been run in the past year alone.
There’s Zumba and Pilates, Deepings Camera Club and two art groups meet there regularly and community services offer support networks for people with Alzheimer’s disease and mental health problems.
There’s help for businesses, a Citizens Advice Bureau drop-in service, and complementary therapies including reiki, reflexology, psychotherapy and osteopathy are available.
Those who run the centre are positive about its future, despite the ticking time bomb which the Government has unleashed underneath the infrastructure of volunteering (see sidebar).
Run with the three elements of health, education and social support in mind, the centre is a registered charity which finds the £1,200-£1,500 per week needed to sustain its maintenance and development through charges made for hiring the rooms.
Local organisations have provided valuable support. The Lions club has provided a garden area, while the accounting system is down to the Rotary club. The centre has developed greatly from 12 years ago, when then-chairman and active parish councillor Pauline Redshaw was one of those who strove to bring the building – then an old health centre building disused for four years – back to life.
A working party persuaded South Kesteven District Council to buy it from the health authority but it was the acquisition of £50,000 from BT as part of its Better Towns competition which made the hopes a reality.
Cllr Redshaw, who is president of the centre, said: “It was a case of talking to lots of people, starting in-houses and ending in the Houses of Parliament (where the group learned it had gained its money).
“We came back and we were over the moon. Then we looked at each other and thought we had opened up a right hornets’ nest!”
Cathy, whose accent still has tinges of her Merseyside upbringing, is also quite a character. She has worked across five continents, so dealing with learners in the Deepings is an easier challenge when you have already taught in mud huts in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe and seen 14-year-old girls with suckling children sitting outside Egyptian employment offices.
She still remembers how post-war World War Two Britain saw previously-strong support networks broken up by people moving to the countryside by necessity – and has since spent most of her life trying to help those in need.
Cathy said: “This is not your average community centre. Its unique selling point is that it is managed, financed and delivered entirely by volunteers.
“I joined in year three when the first set of trustees had run out of steam. I lived locally and thought it was a good building. But I am just a cog, it is an organic process.
“Sustaining the centre is not only about recruiting the right people, but also gaining financing and grants.
“Sometimes the word ‘community’ doesn’t help, as people have the idea of dirty coffee cups, and toilets which don’t smell very sweet. A lot keep their centres spotless, but you are always compared to the worst.
“The tag line is: ‘If it’s safe, it’s clean, it’s warm and it’s friendly, it works’. That is a massive asset and we have worked on it.”
Staff have seen sad sights. Loneliness, people suffering from health or money problems, and the technologically illiterate cut off from their family living abroad.
The remedies have arrived from various sources. Singing for the Brain, a scheme designed to help Alzheimer’s sufferers through music, was a great success. Cathy said: “Fifty people at the first session sang for two hours. We needed a finishing song, so we went with the Laughing Policeman.
“That was two years ago and it has just gone on from there. It brought into focus how important it was to bring in new things every year.”
Lifelong learning courses – such as first aid for work, food hygiene and PC basics – have also provided a few challenges.
Cathy said: “We try to give people opportunities who have not had them before. One man sat bolt upright and said, ‘I’m 94, I live in a big house on my own in the country, and I’m told you can get your shopping online. And I want to be able to send mail to my grandsons in Canada’.
“I spoke to my manager at the time and we agreed to see him on a one-to-one basis.
“He was actually very quick when he wanted to learn. We introduced him to Word and that was as much as he wanted – he didn’t want to have exams or qualifications or anything like that. So he has his shopping delivered and communicates with old friends and family.
“We offered him Skype but he demurred because he was worried that people would see how messy his house was. But he did it in the end.”
A Monday night community group for the elderly is very popular. Cathy said: “Society undermines the dignity of the elderly by assuming they don’t want to do this and that.
“I love them dearly, although I have been known to step in and referee in the Scrabble when it gets heated.”
MP for South Holland and the Deepings, John Hayes, – described by Cathy as one of the finest politicians for the community she has ever met – regularly drops into the centre.
And Mr Hayes, the Minister of State for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning, is only one of many an admirers of the centre.
Cathy said: “We have a large number of people who come in and say, ‘We have got nothing like this where we live’.
“The centre has a bright future.
“I am getting older – I have gone past the ‘greats’ and am now at the ‘great greats’ in my family - and have had various operations. We are just about to change our management structure, and are looking for businessmen and women who can bring something different.
“That especially applies to PR. Once you could send a letter and get £5 from someone, now you fill out a form of 50 sheets and might get nothing.”
Cllr Redshaw added: “We need people to help us with finance, not so much finding it, as telling us about the implications of certain decisions. The problem is that all organisations are fighting for grants. The problem is that some people still don’t know we are here – but it would be very sad to ever see the centre disappear.”
For more information email trustees@deepingscommunitycentre.org.uk or telephone 01778 381770.
Retirement changes will hit volunteering
GOVERNMENT plans to raise the retirement age to 67 will have troubling long-term consequences, warns community centre chairman Cathy Pridgeon.
These changes are not due to take place for at least another 14 years, but few people would want to predict the future of the welfare state, especially in the current economic climate and with rising age expectancies.
Cathy said: “Before, every man retired at 65, and every woman at 60. We also got people who volunteered for us who had retired early and wanted something to do.
“But if you make it so that both go on to 67 you will lose seven years of female volunteers, and two years of male volunteers.
“So they will have to volunteer in the evening, but once they have come in from work and have had a snooze, then they probably won’t want to go out. It won’t just be us affected. It will be charity groups, Age Concern, and others.
“The whole structure of the way these groups operate will have to change – and that won’t go down well.
“We haven’t seen it yet, but it is like waves on the shore. They ripple, and that has a further effect, and so on.
“Sir Stuart Etherington, who is chief executive of the National Council for Voluntary Organisations, came to us. His jaw just dropped when I explained this to him. He said that the ‘higher levels’ haven’t realised what will happen - and I said, ‘You have got to get on with telling them’.”
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