All Saints with St Frideswyde church in Thornton and Crosby launched a warm space, and an after-school club for families, after taking part in Together Liverpool’s Learning Community.
Vicar Rev Poppy Thorpe secured a grant of £2,220 from Sefton CVS to set up the warm space, offering hot drinks, soup and conversation at the church’s community café.
Over six months the warm space welcomed 237 adult visits and 28 visits by children, from October 2023 to March 2024.
Attending Learning Community supported Rev Poppy to apply for the funding, she said: “All the conversations about keeping an eye out for funding and being brave from the Network of Kindness gave me confidence. It was affirming for me and confirmed what we wanted to do.”
Rev Poppy said: “We know it made a big difference to those who came along. One parent fed back this was sometimes what kept their family fed, another family has three generations who come along and it gives them space to be together.”
Rev Poppy is now considering options to apply for further funding, if volunteers can be identified to take on the running of the warm space again this winter. She said: “It was a good experience for the volunteers, and they owned it more and more. People liked it and wanted to see it succeed.
“It helped meet needs like food insecurity and support family budgets during the cost of living crisis, it covers things like social isolation help with heating and also proving space for different people to mix, so it supports with community cohesion too.”
In tandem the church also set up an after school hot chocolate & toast group for families.
The Learning Community social action planning exercise helped identify food insecurity, and activities for children and families, as among the areas of local need churches could help address. This was cross referenced with a listening exercise to survey the local church community about the needs they witness.
Rev Poppy said: “It gave us a really good overview as a deanery. It helped us look at what we are doing really well, but also what we are not addressing like financial insecurity, housing and modern slavery, and we’ve got very little for food insecurity too.”
“We realised we need to do more activities for children and youth, so from that we are now offering a monthly hot chocolate and toast session after school for parents and their kids with games and come and make your own hot chocolate and that’s going really well.
“The need we identified is a space for families to be together without worrying about tidy up. We are providing a space for them to sit and be together in a non-pressured way, because family life is so pressured, they don’t have a lot of opportunity to do that.”
Rev Poppy said the Learning Community influenced the way the church approaches launching new social action: “When we did the (social action mapping) survey, I didn’t think we had the capacity to start something up new, so we just did it once, and very quickly people were asking when the next one was.
“So we now have a rota of volunteers so we can keep it going, and we try for them each to not have to commit to more than every other month. “Learning Community influenced our approach, starting to do one offs, and quickly people wanting to do more.”
The church also hosted a County Lines awareness session for community leaders with Together Liverpool, and is considering future models for how to reach more local parents and young people with this education.
Rev Poppy attended the Learning Community with two lay leaders. She said: “We enjoyed it, we thought it was really good. And even for our volunteers who each had to miss one session it was very easy to come back to and pick up.
“One thing that really struck me was the approach to gathering feedback, always making sure you are trying to get a feel for how effective you are, and how to use some creative methods for feedback, so we’ve been thinking about how to do that more.
“Another really useful conversation was around how do your community become volunteers, and how do volunteers become leaders. Is there an obvious path for them to follow. This really struck me in a whole load of ways.”
Rev Poppy said she would recommend taking part in the Learning Community to churches in other deaneries. She said: “I’d encourage people to take part. We got something out of every session.
“You might think you’ve got no hope, or that you’re doing everything really well or anything in between, but it will help you to think more creatively and give you more courage in what you provide.
“It was really good, really worth doing, really supportive. “It is going to help you think better give you more ideas about how to reach your community.”
“I thought there would be more of the group discussion about how we plug the gaps collectively, but that is something we can do as a (deanery) group.
“The conversation about how do your community become volunteers and how do your volunteers become leaders was particularly useful.”
Reflecting on the Learning Community experience, she added: “It’s inspiring because you can see the big impact the deanery is having across the area. You less feel like you are throwing gravel into a ditch.
“You can see the difference that is being made by all those people doing all those hours. It’s given us more ideas, it’s helped us be more creative and it’s given us more confidence to move forwards in trying new things.”