The Merstham Community Facility Trust has been setup to provide a community meeting place in the heart of Merstham in a vacant shop in Portland drive. The trust, a registered charity, has so far received a grant from the Council, the Merstham Millennium Trust, Raven Housing Trust and currently has grant application in with a number of other organisations.
The objective of the facility will be to provide a flexible location where people can meet and various groups and agencies can operate and deliver services from. We have had interest from a number of groups who would like to provide a large number of activities and support from this facility, these include Adult Skills and computer training, Art classes and courses, job counselling, home work clubs, youth cafe, Debt counselling, CAB, heath advice.
The initial capital cost of the conversion of the shop unit into a community facility is budgeted to be around £25,000, much of which will go towards providing facilities fro the disabled and converting the garage into an office/counselling room. We are hoping to reduce the over all cost of the fit out through the support of local tradesmen and business who we hope will support the project with their services.
We are currently forecasting annual running costs to be around £20,000, some of which will be met by grants and ongoing fundraising and the rest met from the revenue from hiring of the facility to the groups using it. We are currently seeking planning permission to change the use of the building and providing this is agreed, we hoping to be able to start building work at the beginning of January with an opening date of end of March.
Currently this project is being driven by a small committee of trustees, who have work hard to get the project to this stage. Once the facility is open, we plan to establish a management group, made up of the main users of the facility and local residents to sustain and drive the facility forward, this way we hope to give the community and users a stake in how this project is developed.