CHARITY IS SAVED BY LOTTERY FUNDS
Future is secured for five years
THE future of a local charity has been secured for the next five years after it secured half-a-million pounds of lottery funding.
Chell Area Family Action Group (CAFAG) has been supporting young families, pensioners and vulnerable residents for 21 years.
But in October it faced the prospect of having to close down due to all its funding streams running out.
The organisation has, however, now been awarded £498,248 from the National Lottery’s Reaching Communities fund, which will be enough to keep the charity going until 2026.
The charity, based at Whitfield Valley Centre, provides a raft of services including a nursery, creche, lunch club, gardening project and a meals-onwheels scheme, all aimed at improving residents’ physical, mental and social health.
During the Covid-19 pandemic CAFAG has proved particularly invaluable, providing food parcels and 100 tablet computers to vulnerable residents who could have been left isolated in lockdown.
Charity manager Linda Hamnett, who is planning to retire and hand over to assistant manager Emily Taylor, is delighted that she can now step back with CAFAG’S future secure.
She said: “The charity has grown so much since I started here 10 years ago. Back then we just ran a creche a couple of days a week and a lunch club, but now we’re doing so much more, with three vehicles and lots of different projects.
“It’s fantastic that we’ve secured this funding, which will allow us to get to the next level and do even more for the people here.
“It’s also very reassuring for me personally, knowing I can retire with Emily more than capable of taking over, with the funding in place for five years.”
CAFAG employs 25 people – all of whom could have lost their jobs if the funding had not been secured – along with 30 volunteers.
Emily said: “All our funding was due to end in October, so we were facing having to close everything down.
“This was our third bid into the Reaching Communities fund – our first two bids had been successful and so it was quite unusual to get it a third time. But our argument was that we would use the next five years to become more sustainable, by developing as a community enterprise and bringing in more income through things like the cafe.”
Emily says over the past decades CAFAG has become such a vital part of the Chell community, it would have left a huge hole if the funding had not been secured.