About the Organisation
St Peter’s Church West Molesey run Molesey Churches night shelter, working with other local organisations to provide homeless people in Elmbridge with emergency accommodation and aiming to help people move-on to more permanent housing.
As well as running the night shelter and being a local church with community projects, St Peter’s (through its registered charity) provides youth outreach services on behalf of Surrey County Council and operates East Elmbridge food bank.
Many of these services are provided from their community centre building, which is let from the council on a peppercorn rent.
Request details
The community and youth centre’s current layout is not conducive to all the different services that St. Peters already provide from the building, nor does it allow for them to expand into further activities for the benefit of the local community.
Due to its proximity to priority community groups the charity has received interest from local groups such as the Citizens Advice Bureau and NHS social prescribing Team in providing services from the centre. They would also like to improve the sleeping spaces for the night shelter and provide a full-time community cafe, wellbeing garden, recycling hub, counselling rooms and other community use spaces. The ultimate aim is to open every day as a usable and attractive space for the community, to build relationships with vulnerable groups and see long term positive change in beneficiaries’ lives.
The charity has received funding to engage a local architecture practice and are currently working with them to develop drawings for their proposed remodelling of the centre. In order to take the project further and engage in detailed discussions with the council and other potential funders, St Peter’s would be very grateful for any offers of pro bono support from a quantity surveyor to produce an indicative schedule of works and costings (potentially grouped into different phases of works, to align with available funding) for the proposed renovation.
The charity’s current vision for the centre and its proposed renovation includes:
- Splitting a room into 3 soundproof counselling rooms (and storage) to enable 1-2-1 sessions to take place
- Erecting a partition wall and storage on the hall stage to create an additional community space
- Renovating a café area and putting in a glass wall to enable the community café to operate
- Renovating the courtyard to create a fully accessible wellbeing space for all ages and creating a community gardening project for this and the surrounding grounds
- Installation of lighting in the car park for evening use of the centre
- Renovation of a small conference room and office space to provide 2 multi use community spaces
- Creation of a shared working space for community use from a side corridor overlooking the courtyard
- Developing the recording studio control room into a flexible working space for church and council youth staff
Timeline
ASAP