We Were There For Our Community – Can You Be There For Us?

Over the lockdown period our staff and volunteers at the Barn worked hard to ensure we maintained our links with the community.

We ran a collection and delivery service throughout the period, enabling those who couldn’t leave their homes to access fresh produce. We moved our activities online including online art classes, The History Van activities and even a virtual arts festival with free activities and performances for everyone to get involved in! We continued to engage with our volunteers to work from home, creating features such as ‘From the Archive’ and running quizzes to check in on our volunteers and support their well-being. Additionally, our gardeners continued to maintain the Barn gardens so our community could enjoy them when queuing at Sainsbury’s!

One of John Sutcliffe’s online art classes

We now continue to work hard to make sure you feel safe returning to the building and can once again enjoy the coffee shop and the beautiful gardens. Over the next few weeks we are even able to welcome back some of our groups – and look forward to starting those events we can run safely again such as dry-stone walling. We will also be restarting our partnership with Eckington School, providing business management experience for a group of students.

All this has come at great expense to our small charity, a huge loss of income at the same time as increased costs to change our systems, buy PPE and make the site safe.

Eckington School students

We are grateful for all the support our community provided during this period. Now as we move to build up our income streams we ask for your support again, to help keep our beautiful Barn and gardens safe for future generations to enjoy and to enable us to start our programme of working in the community. Just a one-off, ten pound donation could really help to make a difference to our small charity. Click here to donate.

Below images: residents from Brookeholme Care Home enjoying VE Day celebrations, Lah Di Dah’s virtual live show, previous Artisan & Producers’ markets, Medieval and Arts Festivals.