Learning Community faith group story: St Gabriel’s church, Huyton Quarry
St Gabriel’s church in Huyton Quarry accessed support to help develop a £30,000 community social action hub and cafe, through Together Liverpool’s Huyton Learning Community.
The church is renovating its existing community hub and café area, to create a more energy efficient space.
It means different will groups have protected time and places to access activities to suit their needs, including a dementia friendly café and computer support club.
Vicar Revd Canon Malcolm Rogers MBE, also Area Dean for Huyton, secured a £10,000 local government Connected Communities grant, after taking part in our social action planning session.
Coupled with other grants, the resulting renovation works will help the church deliver a wider range of activities, and continue existing activities in a more efficient and nurturing environment, including:
- Community café offering free wifi with pay as you feel and pay it forward options
- Lunch club reaching 80 people with hot food, drinks and company
- Computer support using Age UK recommended laptops
- Cognitive therapy Love to Move group for people with mobility challenges
- Dementia friendly café session
- After school drop-in for parents and carers
Previously all groups gathered in the same large space, which has a capacity of 100 but was noisy and often busy, also serving as a warm space, and community drop-in.
Now the church wants to curate dedicated spaces and times for groups to also address additional needs they have identified in the community such as carers and people with dementia.
The new smaller space will also be more energy efficient, helping the church reduce its carbon footprint by closing off unused spaces and investing in energy efficient heating.
Canon Mal said: “When we started Learning Community, we had this big project with several hundred people involved, it wasn’t financially viable and the funding was running out, we had overstretched volunteers, and we were becoming more and more aware of the deeper needs of the people we were serving.
“So what this process has enabled us to do is first of all not beat ourselves up, to find ways to be more strategic and sustainable, in terms of energy and volunteers, and better meeting the needs of local people.
“They way we’ve done that is moving from trying to do bigger projects to transforming into a smaller space, and being very deliberate about designing into it the ability to be multi-purpose.
“Learning Community gave us permission to start thinking about the space in a different way.
“It’s been an entirely positive experience. It’s helped us to do some serious problem solving and created a safe and enabling environment to ask ourselves these questions, and there is a vulnerability in that.
“The mapping was really encouraging, you suddenly realise the value of what you do in a strategic way. It was permission-giving in allowing us to put down some of the things we thought we might need to do, as others are already providing them.”
“The second session helped us to dig deeper into problem solving. In between I’d had a 1-1 session with James (Together Liverpool) and we’d secured the additional £10,000.
“Just meeting as our staff team in the Learning Community enabled us to look at: How we manage and support our volunteers; How do we create an atmosphere that is suitable for different groups different aged and needs. It helped us make the decisions about how to use the space.
“It’s been an energising and informative and useful process – all really worthwhile and helping us think in a strategic way about how to overcome problems and challenges, and created a pathway for us to properly develop our offer.
“Being strategic about our goals and outputs has helped unlock more funding, and to harness the previous work we’ve done to build relationships with community.
“It’s been a different kind of experience, very empowering and hopefully a positive encouragement to other churches across deanery, some of them have made brave decisions.
“The Learning Community absolutely plugged into where we are at as a deanery how we are responding to the needs of local people
“Social justice is the core of the gospel and it’s really helped us in that area.”
Offering encouragement for other deaneries considering taking part in a Learning Community Canon Mal said: “Go for it, you have to dig deep if you are going to do it properly, it can feel scary as you are asking these questions.
“It has given us a pathway out of that scariness. Realising it’s not all down to us, that there are people who have experienced the same problems that there are solutions that we can implement.
“It’s one of the best quality deanery opportunities we’ve been involved in.”