Our very small team are extremely busy working behind the scenes as we begin to prepare our charity for the next stage of our Rock Hall project. We may be a small team but we have written winning funding bids so far for our project (the biggest was £99,600 to the Heritage Fund) and managed our Rock Hall project to a high standard (according to feedback we have received) and we are progressing in record time! These are just a handful of the things we are working on at the moment:-
The £3 million funding bid: We have started to write the first document needed which will form part of our £3 million funding bid. It’s called an Activity Plan and now we have seen what’s required, we think it’s going to be a huge document (possibly over 400 pages long) jammed packed with information that the National Lottery Heritage Fund require from us. This document is in addition to the bid application document we need to complete and other information we need to gather together. From speaking to others who have been involved in a similar bid process, the funding bid documents could end up being around 2000 pages in total. We currently have no funding to pay for our time spent putting the bid together or any funding for external support, so we are relying on people’s good nature to help us as much as they can.
Various Council departments including Property, Planning and Libraries and Museum Teams will be involved in providing us with some of the information we need for our funding bid and we are very grateful for their assistance.
Rock Hall Volunteering Programme: We have started to develop a formal Volunteering Programme and thanks to the help of Local Councillor Tracey Wilkinson, we now have various documents that we require to make progress with this. There will be specific Volunteer Roles advertised in future. We have also streamlined our Steering Groups (we have a main project steering group, a Heritage group and now we have an additional Fundraising Group too).
Fundraising Campaign – we have started to develop our campaign which will be launched in February . Thanks to our fundraising group members, we are progressing well at the moment with that but we may need more help with that group. We need to raise a 10% contribution to the funding bid (this is a requirement of the Heritage Fund) so we will be needing the help of the whole community to achieve this. If we do not raise the money required, we will not be able to start the development stage in September (if we are successful with our funding bid application in May). More details about our fundraising campaign will be released as soon as we can.
Rock Hall Dedicated Website – we have paid Local company ScruffyMonkey to produce a basic website for us thanks to the funding we were awarded by Bolton CVS. We hope they will complete it very soon.
Rock Hall – we aim to turn Rock Hall into a vibrant, multipurpose, viable, sustainable community asset. To do this, we propose to sympathetically renovate the existing building and extend it at the rear. The building as it currently stands, is too small to be viable. If we can achieve our proposals (subject to planning permission and public consultation etc.), there could be a cafe/bistro, function room, community meeting rooms, lift, toilet/changing facilities, heritage room/shop and enterprise space for example (all with disabled access).
We would now like to share with you just 2 initial drawings of how the rear extension of the Hall could look in future. One is a more modern design than the other. Nothing has been decided yet. The Development Stage of the bid would give us the funding to have more architectural work and drawings/plans produced. We just wanted to show you 2 examples of how the Hall could look if we are successful with our funding bid and fundraising campaign. These are rough sketches and not final designs. The building will be accessible to all.
We will update you again as soon as we can. As ever, we are extremely grateful for your support. THANK YOU!
