Voting for the Hub is now live!

You remember I talked about “The Hub” last week?

I’ve been fortunate enough to speak to one of their volunteer fundraisers, Ayvin Rogers. And now I’m even more convinced that I’d like you to take a moment to vote for them to get some funding in order to move their project forward!

Energyshare – a collaboration of River Cottage and British Gas – have £100,000 up for grabs to one community project and it’s up to you to decide who gets the money.

The Hub are the only finalist who are ‘young people focused’. And while you might be wondering ‘well what about the rest of the community?’ I believe that if you take care of the kids, you take care of the whole community. They are, after all, our future…

Ayvin, who is also the chair of the youth music organisation, B Sharp, is passionate about working with young people to improve their lives through music and art. He thinks nothing of getting stuck in to chairing committees and organisations in his spare time and is a committed community activist. All this when he’s not running his shop – phew!

Ayvin told me a little history about the Hub: Originally it was built as a church hall in the 1920s. From the 1970s it was a youth centre, but it gradually went into demise and the building went up for auction six years ago. Local residents were eager to keep the building available for the community and the Lyme Regis Development Trust, a local school and Dorset County Council Youth Service formed a partnership to buy it.

Ayvin tells me there has been no youth club for more than 5 years and no skate park after 30 years of requests. The vision of the Hub is to provide a community venture where the children, aged around 11-18 are consulted on every aspect of development. They’ve already been in there wielding cans of paint and brushes and have access to a cafe on the ground floor three nights a week.

Plans are for the roof to be refurbished, solar panel installation, an air source heat pump, a new condensing boiler and cavity wall insulation, which is how your vote can help them source the funding for this much-needed work.

I learned about an exciting and innovative plan for the cafe, how local groups are itching to get involved with the Hub and about their vision to host Green expos to support local businesses. I’ll tell you more about these ventures next week because you need to go and vote!

this is a sponsored opportunity on behalf of British Gas