After seven years of failed funding bids, the deprived Welsh ex-mining community of Glyncoch has finally raised £792,000 to build a community centre, utilising a crowd-funding site for the final £40,000.
Celebrities including Stephen Fry, web business guru Martha Lane Fox and Welsh comic Gryff Rhys Jones have leant their Twitter support for Glyncoch's campaign to build a centre that will support a 'people and work network', fitness clubs, IT facilities and recreational events.
The project has also seen corporate support from Deloitte, Asda, and Wales and West Utilities which provided funding at an early stage of the crowd-funding push. Admiral Insurance founder Henry Engelhardt coughed-up £10,000 and Tesco contributed the final £12,000 last week.
Glyncoch, a community of around 1300 houses, is the 39th most deprived area in Wales, out of 1,896 defined areas. An ex-mining town in South Wales, 46 per cent of its residents are unemployed, 29 per cent live with a long-term illness and 16 per cent have never worked. But 200 registered volunteers in the area average 37,000 volunteering hours annually.
Failed BIG funding bid
Samantha Turner, director of Glyncoch Community Regeneration (GCR), the volunteer-led group leading the project, told civilsociety.co.uk that the community has worked hard to raise the funds after a failed Big Lottery Fund bid.
By summer last year GCR had secured £752,000 from Welsh Assembly funding pots, which it was eligible for as the community is high on the deprivation index, and hoped to generate the final £40,000 from BIG's Asset Transfer Fund. But the bid was unsuccessful, threatening the planned build which had been delayed in order to qualify for the fund.
“It took months and months to go through and we had to jump through hoops for them, and when we weren’t successful it was a bit of a blow," Turner said.
"But at the end of the day, we’ve got funding for our new centre now and the community have worked hard for it so they really have ownership of it.
"The existing centre, even though it’s now council-owned, the community raised money to built the original one anyway. And they still have bingo in each other’s houses and things like that.”
Some £5,000 was raised by the local community towards the build of the centre, but she advised, the vital corporate support would not have been possible without the crowd-funding website spacehive.com, which led the final push for funds:
“They pushed us to raise money locally, which we have – the community have really rallied around and we’ve raised a lot locally, from people who haven’t got a lot of money… they’ve done some wacky things, really trying to raise money.
“And spacehive.com had connections where we didn’t. If we go down to our local Tesco store, they haven’t got the authority to give us any money, but spacehive really had more power to try to get the big businesses to invest, and they got Stephen Fry to write a tweet about us to try to up the campaign.”
Spacehive.com launched last year and took on Glyncoch Community Centre as its first project. The service allows anyone to put forward a project proposal for public spaces and aims to inject new sources of funding. People who pledge money are only charged if a project goes ahead.
The site has been endorsed by Liz Peace, chief executive of the British Property Federation, who said: "We support the government's intention to create a planning system that supports economic growth but the reality is nearly £300m of funding for capital public space developments has been lost.
"Enabling the public to take direct action through spacehive.com could help ensure vital improvements go ahead by channelling funding from companies and individuals."
Turner advised the building works for the new community centre began in March despite not having all of the funding in place, as the current community centre is under disrepair and is under threat of closure from the council. A deadline of December has been set for the new community centre's completion.
