Community centres to share £270,000 Covid recovery fund

The Covid-19 emergency funding provided to the council by government in 2020 and 2021 is aimed at enabling a number of community centres to restart, recover and once again become vibrant community assets in a safe and secure way.

Cabinet member for cooperative communities, engagement and partnerships, Councillor Paul Watling said: “During the pandemic these community hubs have been the glue that has held everything together and enabled Telford & Wrekin Council to support its communities.

“They are right at the heart of people’s lives and have for many been a lifeline – a place where we can extend our support to the most vulnerable.

“We simply wouldn’t have achieved what we had without working so closely with these centres and volunteers and hope this money will go some way in thanking them for their support and help them start getting back on their feet.”

The impact of the pandemic has meant a loss of income for community centres through groups not being able to meet and hire facilities or provide services such as holiday clubs while still having to meet daily running costs.

Community centres in receipt of this funding will be those which the council successfully transferred to voluntary sector organisations and a further eight organisations that worked closely with the council and residents during the pandemic.

Some of the work carried out by these centres included collecting and delivering shopping and prescriptions, providing meal deliveries including food parcels to people experiencing food poverty and weekly breakfast parcels to children in receipt of free school meals.

They also helped maintain a keeping in touch telephone befriending service, provided well-being checks to people whom they knew were vulnerable, supplied activity packs to those who are clinically vulnerable and needed to self-isolate and hosted NHS services to deliver vaccinations.