This month’s CCA newsletter is a message from the Chair of Trustees about the Community Centre and how you can perhaps play a role in its future.
Chair Dave Cartwright writes:
Chellaston has grown significantly since the Centre was built by the Community for the Community in 1988, with funds raised by residents and, at the time, financial support from the local authority. Fast forward 34 years and the Centre remains one of a handful of truly independent operations within the City of Derby. The Association is the leaseholder and the Trustees are responsible for overseeing the management of the premises.
Trustees are all volunteers, the majority retirees, ensuring the continuing success of the Centre and we are a registered Charitable Incorporated Organisation. Some Centres are less fortunate than ours, due to a lack of volunteers, resulting in premises being leased to a business operation primarily with only secondary availability for community use.
The current administration has revived the Centre over the past 8 years, upgrading facilities and increasing hire utilisation. We now have limited hire slots for new activities and unfortunately have to disappoint many enquirers. That’s why, as you may be aware, we have embarked on developing an expansion plan to construct the west end annexe and are working tirelessly to attract the necessary funding.
The concern of the Trustees is that as a team we are not getting any younger, but do have a wealth of knowledge and expertise, which needs to be shared with new recruits. If not, at some stage in the future, we will reach a position where the Association may fold and the lease is forfeited. It would then be the Council’s responsibility to find another leaseholder which, more than likely, given the recent history of some Centres, would be a business operator.
We do not wish this to happen but need to make residents aware that the Centre cannot continue ad- infinitum unless we maintain a core team of Trustees. The role is not demanding or necessarily time consuming and certainly it would be nice to see an increase in female representation, as well as lowering our team age profile.
We have, over the last two years in our regular monthly newsletter, highlighted this concern but have had very little response. To ensure your Community Centre goes from strength to strength, and not the way of some other establishments, we hope some residents may come forward to help.
We can be contacted either by e mail – enquiries@chellastonca.org or call us on 07895386433 to discuss in more detail what the role of a Trustee entails.
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