If you already know about our bid and want to help please click here to complete the survey, putting building improvements top. Otherwise, read on….
There are many things Haworth Village Hall has learned in the last year; the most important being:
- Times change; to keep the hall open for our users we need to change with them
- Community is important: We depend on our users and the people of Haworth to make this hall open
- Spaces are vital; When our users stopped using the hall, their businesses or charities suffered….but so did the user base. Going forward it is going to become evident that real community space, where people can safely develop and grow. We have the largest space in Haworth and one of the largest in Keighley and Worth Valley area…we need to stay open.
To help us address these we have worked with one of our users, Space to Inspire, to look at a plan to take the Village Hall forward. But we need your help to ensure Bradford Council recognise quite how important our services are. The plan is a bid to the Towns Fund, a fund that looks at ways of keeping communities alive.
Our plan can be summarised as follows:
- Improve the building so that it can remain open and affordable for all users. By cutting emissions, we’ll improve the environment, improve the look of this building in the heart of Haworth and make the hall more usable and affordable for all our users.
- Return the building to its original use. Our high streets and community buildings are dying. The demand for housing and move of many services online, means buildings like ours become cash-cows, not community assets. We’re determined to keep the building open, but we want more than that. Haworth Village Hall started as a school, a space where the community came together to learn and grow….and it has started doing that again. Many of our users develop children and adults and now we want to put that at the centre of what we do. Space to Inspire have a track record of engaging young people and adults with STEM (Science Technology Engineering, Mechanics) and has invested in top range technology and has links with international organisations. This is an area the UK needs to develop, and our research shows that people locally value both the importance of coding and cutting edged technology skills as well as woodworking and traditional joinery skills that school don’t often have the expertise or research to teach. By putting STEM at the centre of what we do and developing some of our outbuildings for their use, we can create a funding stream that brings people and skills into the area to help develop all of us. Haworth Village Hall was a school for the skills of yesterday…now it can be a hub for the skills of tomorrow.
- Become a world class example of community space: There are many examples of how community buildings have been repurposed and benefitted their community. The Bromley in Bow centre in London took an old, neglected, church and a community need for healthcare to build a wellbeing centre featuring a doctor’s surgery and community space for all kinds of traditional and exceptional development activities that is now the envy and an example for many. Our ambitions are just as strong, but our focus is skills. Whether it’s the skills Scouting develops, the cultural skills of a drama courses offers, the magical early years development we do alongside our children….Haworth Village Hall is already at the centre. By putting the STEM ingredient into the mix we can take that the next level and not only regenerate the building and user base, but improve the skills and wellbeing of the area, link with local employers and draw expertise from all over the world.
How you can help
THIS ALL STARTS WITH YOU. We need you to show your support by putting our bid in the running.
Bradford Council have places this in “building improvement” a category that reflects the technical nature but neglects our vision. So we need you to complete the Bradford Council survey below, clearly putting “Building Improvements” at the top and prioritising any areas relating to skills and sustainability. We need you to do this today at
We also need your views at our survey of community need at http://survey.haworthvillagehall.org.uk/
Haworth Village Hall provides a central space for many groups and has learned a lot from the pandemic. Our bid is central in redeveloping what was yesterday and making it fit for tomorrow and beyond. We need this bid to sustain the hall not only through the Covid-19 recovery but heading forward into the future. However, we need your support.
Please complete the surveys now.