For information on local support in Bearwood for Covid-19, whether you need support or want to give it, please check out our special page on this: Covid-19 Support
Like everyone, we’re trying to work out day by day how to best manage the situation. I’m Sally Taylor and I lead on the development of Bearwood Community Hub (getting word out, involving people, doing the business plan and working out financial/funding investment to make it happen). Along with our Board, I’m working out how to keep things moving whilst also looking after two young children at home. I can’t promise to move very fast!
What we do know is that when life returns to normal (whatever the new normal is), we will need places like the envisioned hub to come together and build further on the incredible cooperation that has grown out of our already-supportive community.
To that end we will do our best to knuckle down and develop the business plan based on the community engagement we’ve done over the past few months. We will do our best to work with the architects that have supported us and are currently coming up with designs for the space - much as our community conversations about those will need to be online rather than face to face. We don’t know how we can include those people who aren’t online yet, but we will think on this. Our choices might be limited.
If you would like to help develop, edit, be a critical friend on any of these things then please let me know at hello@bearwood.cc
Finally, here’s an update the three main activities that we had set up during our development period:
Bearwood Community Garden: we may continue to develop this with people attending one by one, but this will be dependent on a) whether the Church of England continues to allow people onto their site, b) the extent of lockdown measures we may end up experiencing and c) the capacity of volunteers, many of whom are either over 70, in personal isolation or now have children at home to look after.
Bearwood Business Network: we may look to arrange mutually supportive online video meetings, depending on if there is any call for it and (again) capacity.
Bearwood Trade School: in time we will look at the viability of delivering this online or we will share Trade School opportunities that others, such as Impact Hub Birmingham, if they start online Trade Schools.
If you have ideas for us then please let us know at hello@bearwood.cc - we’re all just feeling our way at the moment. But we promise to keep in touch.
Thank you for being with us so far!
Sally Taylor
Bearwood Community Hub CIC