St Pauls Community & Wellbeing Hub
Through our Hub we'd like to increase our number of social eating events, launch a carers group for our Memory Café, and provide more opportunities with our community to engage with one another.
About this cause
Our community café and kitchen on Boundary Road, Wilford Hill began in April 2022. Our continued vision is to encourage community cohesion, combat loneliness and isolation, and improve the mental health and wellbeing of individuals through a mind, body and spirit approach. Our community consists of people of all ages from parents and carers with babies and toddlers; to elderly residents of care homes; to lonely and isolated residents; to primary and secondary school students and beyond. We offer a social eating programme, community meals, friendship groups, a grief café, LEGO club, memory café and outreach work in the community. We would now like to better meet these needs by improving our hours of accessibility and developing our volunteer programme in an expansion of the project.
How this cause brings people in the community together
We’ve been overwhelmed by the response by the community, and by the clear need for what we are providing. We began with one or two people a fortnight who fell into the category that may be considered as having food poverty, or those who experienced loneliness and isolation. Between 80-100 people now attend our social eating events each time and consistently report the value of the events, not just for food offerings but for the community engagement and social aspect. Since the beginning of November 2022, our community kitchen has seen approximately 10 people accessing a nutritious meal each week. The support and partnership we've received from our community shows us that we have listened well to its needs.