By Zoe Roberts, Activities Co-ordinator
St Mary’s had previous been a centre with no activity. Since starting working with the session, we have successful run coffee morning, a quiz session and a multi-agency drop in at the centre. Since Christmas, we have held crafts sessions at the centre. This has been attended by eight people. The ladies have enjoyed their first six sessions and we have looked to book in another set.
We discussed them setting an informal group up themselves but no one wanted the responsibility. They feel they would be out of pocket having to buy resources and much prefer to attend organised things as they are learning new skills.
We are now looking into this so that we can leave centres with ‘leavers packs’. This will include teas, coffee etc as well as other practical and fun resources. However, this should help ease the transition to maintaining activities. We are going to arrange another coffee morning with them and look to hold a multi-agency in the centre once a quarter with the support of our HRA contract. In attention to this, we have arranged for exercise sessions to take place at the centre with RUCST.
The centre and the fledging groups is likely to need some kind of continued support, into the year. However, from a centre where there was previously no activity and the only use was from Mears (whose staff use this centre for lunches), it has been positive to start to see a growth in there.
