Season’s Greetings From Castleland

Another year almost gone, another lovely experience working with our Volunteers and group runners to deliver services from our centre.

This year we managed to introduce a few new things as well as refine some older things to try and deliver on being one of the best community centres we can in terms of service and features.

We managed to keep our Foodshare programme going every week throughout the year, only having to cancel due to shortages less than 5 times which just goes to show how awesome our volunteers are!

We improved our booking system to be a lot simpler to use and completely “Self booking & payment” possible and we saw a huge increase in self bookings as a result – which is always good to see, as we want to make it easier than ever to book at Castleland and we’re hoping to continue to refine this process based on stats and feedback well into the future.

We completed a redesign of the Belvedere Park so that it is both easier to maintain and more conducive to events and public use. We’ve already seen a lot more people in there with their dogs and one of our regular groups “Godfirst Church” held a carol singing event this month which would not have been possible with the previous design, so we’re glad the new layout has allowed for this.

We launched our partnership with Cowork local funded by the Community Renewal Fund to offer a Coworking space for self employed people, teams looking to avoid the commute and other businesses that are looking for an alternative to working from home. Thanks to the project we were able to upgrade our fibre connection throughout the building and do some great networking. It’s been a bit slow taking off, but with a new approach in 2023 we’re hoping that the CoWork team can increase awareness of the project.

Additionally to this, despite a huge increase in the centre’s overheads due to the energy increases (like many other organisations and businesses) – we are proud to say that we managed to keep our room hire prices the same.

Firstly we want to acknowledge the hard work and dedication that each of our volunteers puts into helping us with our various projects. There’s a lot of things that people don’t see and a lot of volunteers who aren’t front facing who provide vital assistance and they deserve so much for selflessly giving up their valuable time to make a lot of what we do work. So without a doubt, we are extremely grateful to have such a wonderful team with us.

We’d like to say a big thank you to our food partners too: Greggs, FareShare, Morrisons, Co-op and Tesco who work tirelessly with us to help make the FoodShare service possible, especially now that it’s needed more than ever before.

We’d also like to thank our Trustees and groups for continuing to help guide the centre and give vital support and feedback to help us improve as service providers.

And on top of that we’d really like to thank the different funding bodies and organisations that have supported us in many ways throughout the year.

In no particular order, we very much want to thank: The National Lottery Fund, Vale of Glamorgan Council, Glamorgan Voluntary Services, Trusthouse, Moondance, Comic Relief, Magic Little Grants, Newydd, Family Information Service, Garfield Foundation, Oakdale, Avian Gardening Services, Waterloo Foundation, Barry Town Council, Digital Communites, Cwmpas and CoWork Local.

Thank you everyone and have a lovely holiday period. We will see you on the 3rd January when Castleland reopens.

The Castleland Team