We were delighted to receive a grant from the National Lottery’s Awards for All programme recently. The grant has helped us adapt our Small Works project to support our social enterprise members and local residents affected by the pandemic. Our main aim in the short term has been to help our members restructure their services during the tough times caused by the pandemic using co-design and digitalisation. In the longer term, we aim to expand our offer for residents by providing more comprehensive support to social enterprises and community initiatives and more activities from our Small Works space.
Since the pandemic started in March 2020, our office has been shut to protect the vulnerable people we work with. This has impacted our members drastically, as they could no longer run activities for their beneficiaries. Almost all of them have had loss of income and have struggled to carry on their mainly charitably community-based programmes, such as running activities for older people at risk of isolation and for children with learning difficulties. The loss of rental income has also been a challenge for the Small Works project itself.
We have worked closely with our members to find out their needs and identify ways for them to take their activities online. Our support has ranged from helping our members with IT issues, to assisting them with accountancy, to creating an online chess club for one of our members where older people can play chess online and stay in touch through video. The co-design process can be challenging at times, as it may come across as abstract or unnecessary. But our experience with our members has been that once they have seen the results in action, they’re invariably glad to have been involved.
We are grateful to the National Lottery for their support during a difficult period and we’re looking forward to re-opening Small Works for our members and the community in the near future.
