New grant takes The Swan closer to completion

A huge thank you from Wellspring Settlement to the Nisbet Trust for agreeing to give us £30,000 towards making The Swan watertight and safe as part of its redevelopment. This money will allow us to complete the roof, strengthen the structure, and to begin work on making the walls watertight too. This structural work needs to be completed before we can move onto the next phase of the redevelopment, and we hope to get a positive response soon on the planning application we submitted several months ago,

We are busy working with partners to improve youth services in the area and our vision is that the ground floor of the building will be open for community use during the day, and for youth work after school, evenings and weekends.  We invite any providers of youth work who would like to use the premises to get in touch with us, especially if you are thinking about running volunteer-led activities for local young people, led by local people. We will be working with the Somali Resource Centre over the end of the summer and autumn to give young people the opportunity to tell us what they would like to see happening in the Swan when it is completed.

The upstairs of the Swan will be new offices for the Somali Resource Centre who need additional space as a successful, expanding, local organisation.

We cannot wait to finish the building as we want it to be a significant boost to this area, particularly for the young people who have had a tough time of it over the last couple of years. It will be brilliant to see something new opening for the community that people of all ages and from all backgrounds can share and enjoy each other’s company in. This is what people are telling us they want and it will be a real privilege to make that happen.

The money from the Nisbet Trust is one more step towards achieving this.