Autumn/Winter 2018 19 - The Abbey Centre · our 70th birthday party at the Abbey entre. This was a...
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Transcript of Autumn/Winter 2018 19 - The Abbey Centre · our 70th birthday party at the Abbey entre. This was a...
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Thank You Donors ...................... 3 Volunteer Recognition Scheme .. 3 Thank You Volunteers ................ 4 Women Off to Work ................... 5 Our 70th Birthday ....................... 6 Westminster Freedom Choir ...... 8
Doina Folk Dance Group ............. 8 Community Champions .............. 9 ACA History............................... 10 Royal Albert Hall Songbook ...... 10 Stop Smoking Support .............. 11 Upcoming Activities .................. 12
Inside this issue
Churchill Gardens & Tachbrook Community Champions team, working at the Abbey Centre, was shortlisted for an Active Westminster Award. We didn’t win, but it was difficult to be disappointed as we heard so many inspiring stories at the ceremony.
This was a fantastic event at Lord’s cricket ground, hosted by Sky Sports News presenter David Garrido, Olympic gold medallist Tessa Sanderson and young British table tennis player Tin-Tin Ho.
It wasn’t all bad news for the Abbey Centre as Ian, the coordinator of our nominated project, won a camera for taking the best selfie, as he showed off his football skills.
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www.theabbeycentre.org.uk
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We reached out to a number of businesses and organisations for their support in organising our 70th anniversary celebrations and we were thrilled by the response we received.
Many thanks to our neighbours, the Cinnamon Club, for donating a meal for two as a prize in our anniversary fundraising raffle. Along with designer goods donated by Burberry, this helped us to raise a fantastic £500 to support our work with our community.
A big thank you to several of our suppliers who supported our 70th birthday party. Local café & catering company Fresco’s provided much of the food for the event. Our food suppliers Brakes, Turnells & Bidfood also contributed to provide drinks & other supplies. Property management company Tradition also donated £200 to help our work.
We are immensely grateful for all the support that enabled us to organise the celebration that we felt our organisation & service users deserved.
Join us next time for news of many great deeds done over Christmas.
We’ve recently signed up for a new volunteer recognition scheme, so we can give something back to the amazing people who support our work throughout the year.
We’ll be working with ValueYou, who offer gift vouchers and discount cards to volunteers who give more than 100 hours supporting a local charity over 12 months.
The card offers discounts at hundreds of independent businesses around London—cafes, florists, restaurants, pubs, butchers, dry cleaners, hairdressers, bookshops, fishmongers and more.
If you’re interested in volunteering at the Abbey Centre, please get in touch to find out more—contact [email protected].
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We serve meals to homeless people twice every week, and we’ve grown very fond of some of our long-term service users. However we always hope that they can start providing for themselves and living independently so they are no longer forced to use the service. So we’re very pleased to say that three of our regular service users have recently found homes, and two of these now have jobs.
Many thanks to our volunteer Fernando, and those from the Cabinet Office for helping us every week. Thanks also to our food suppliers City Harvest and Westminster Foodbank, and our partner organisations — CGL (Change, Grow, Live), who support those with drug and alcohol dependency issues, and sexual health advice service SASH.
Gisella has been supporting us in our café over the past year, where she has put in a hugely impressive total of over 400 hours as a volunteer. This includes helping us provide meals for homeless people each week. We recently needed a chef for the service at short notice and Gisella kindly stepped up to cook for around 40 people at each service. We all immediately warmed to her generous nature and good humour, yet with the hard line of a head chef, she is able to command the smooth running of any kitchen.
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Our Women Off to Work team have continued their programme of workshops & other activities, providing expert advice, training & networking opportunities to help local women into employment.
We ran a unique workshop with Women With Voices which was a fun, interactive session designed to help women build resilience and confidence, and use this to
help reach their goals.
Participants said it was a very useful workshop, with one woman saying the most important thing they learned was to “Recognise your inner power and use it in your life.”
The team also held their first Employment & Training Fair, where we brought together employers from around Westminster to discuss current job vacancies & training opportunities for local women. We also had one-to-one CV advice with recruitment experts from various organisations.
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In October, the Abbey Community Association celebrated its 70th anniversary with a week of great days out and other events & activities.
This began with a family trip to Windsor Castle. One child on the trip said “I had so much fun and I went to see where Meghan and Harry got married”.
Also on Monday, our silver members went to Kew Gardens, where they enjoyed the huge and diverse collection of plants across several buildings and 300 acres.
On Tuesday, we had a family trip to the Tower of London, where kids said the best thing about the day was “All the interesting facts about history”.
Meanwhile at the Abbey Centre, we held a special lunch to show our appreciation for our amazing volunteers who support our work every day. Later that afternoon, we threw a Tea Party for our silver members. These are consistently some of our most popular events, so we had to include one in our anniversary celebrations. One happy attendee said “The dancing was fantastic, I felt happy and wanted to go on the dance floor every time, thank you everyone”.
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On Wednesday, we took families on a trip down the Thames by clipper boat to Greenwich, where we enjoyed lunch at the market, before walking around Greenwich park, where we could look out over London from the Royal Observatory. We also had an exciting interruption to our journey, when our boat had to wait for the marines to put on a military display for the visiting Dutch royal family next to Tower Bridge and HMS Belfast.
On Thursday morning, we ran a family art workshop with the Royal Academy, who we work with regularly.
In the evening, our staff, supporters, partners and service users celebrated at our 70th birthday party at the Abbey Centre. This was a wonderful evening with entertainment provided by our Doina Eastern European folk dance group, who have been meeting at the Abbey Centre since 2010, and our community choir which has only started singing together this year. We also had music and dancing throughout the evening and we got everyone - even the trustees - to do the “Baby Shark” dance (below).
On the last day of celebrations on the Friday, we spent the morning on guided tours of Tate Britain, where one person said “I have learnt new skills and information about Tate Britain, also very interesting!”. We finished the week with trips down the road to the magnificent Westminster Abbey, where the only complaint we received was that they wanted to spend more time there!
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Our community choir, named Westminster Freedom Choir, has been very busy in the past few months. They only started singing together earlier this year, and they have already been out performing at various events—charity and public health conferences, AGMs and awards ceremonies. No musical experience is required to join, and it’s wonderful to see them performing together and looking and sounding confident and professional, so soon after their formation. One person says their weekly sessions are “great fun, and the teacher’s very lovely and lively.”
They’ve just finished a busy festive period performing Christmas carols at a variety of venues around Westminster.
Also entertaining us at our 70th anniversary party were the Doina group who have been meeting at our centre every week since 2010, to dance in various different traditional styles from around eastern Europe. We were very impressed by the energy and enthusiasm of their dancing, as well as their knowledge of the different dances in the region.
If you’re interested in attending either of these groups, get in touch to find out more: 020 7222 0303 or [email protected]
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Our Community Champions have been providing Walking Football sessions for just over a year now, and this has quickly become one of our most popular activities. Many attendees are huge football fans who thought they could no longer play, but this provides a way for people of different ages and abilities to stay active in their favourite sport. Participants have said “I have made new friends and served my first hat trick in 20 years,” and “Walking football is the future”!
Community Champions have a number of other activities in the local area. As well as providing useful, seasonal health & wellbeing information at pop-up stalls and other events, they run exercise classes for men and women. They are also seeking volunteers for their latest project, Maternity Champions, to guide new & expectant mothers through the challenges of pregnancy & motherhood, by introducing them to other local mums and useful services. If you’re local, passionate and want to share your skills, please do get in touch. They also celebrated another year for the project at their annual conference, attended by hundreds of people at the magnificent Porchester Hall (pictured right). Here we enjoyed entertainment including our own choir, heard success stories from different teams of Champions around London, and engaged in round table discussions with other organisations, on the topic of different stages of life.
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Our 70th anniversary was a great opportunity to find out more about the history of our Community Association.
The organisation was formed on 20th July 1948, capitalizing on the spirit of togetherness that was fostered during the 2nd World War. Our first home was in three rooms in the City Council’s Cleansing Depot on Monck Street.
In April 1949, our Community Centre was created as we moved into Millicent Fawcett Hall, a former base for the suffragettes, just down the road on Marsham Street. We stayed here until we moved to our current location on Great Smith Street in 1990.
Our past activities included groups for tape recording, railway societies, Morris dancing, magicians, potholing, Gamblers Anonymous, a banjo circle, and much more. Theatre was much more popular at the time, and this was reflected in a range of drama groups, as well as an annual drama festival. We even had theatre legend
Sir Laurence Olivier here, rehearsing for his first television performance in 1958, as reported in the Daily Herald newspaper.
In the picture above you can see an outing to an unknown location for our Abbey Club “for retired business and professional persons” in 1968, and to the left is a picture of the Queen at an Abbey Community Association stall at an event around 1970.
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We welcomed back Albert’s Band from the Royal Albert Hall, playing a selection of songs by some of the world-famous artists that have played at the iconic venue throughout the years. Attendees had a great time singing along to classic tunes by Dame Vera Lynn, Sir Tom Jones, The Beatles, Frank Sinatra and more.
We received lots of positive feedback about the event, with one person saying the best thing about the event was “The exuberance of the visiting musicians, very much enjoyed.”
Tania, our Stop Smoking Support Worker, recently received an award for her impressive efforts to improve lives by helping people quit. As well as providing regular assessments and professional advice, she’s able to offer up to £100 of medication to help you kick the habit. If you would like her support, please get in touch to find out more.
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We have some exciting new projects coming up in the new year. See below for the time & location of these activities.
We have activities to help with pretty much all of your New Years’ Resolutions, such as our Stop Smoking Support service or brand new Men’s Yoga classes.
We’re pleased to offer support to children in new anti-bullying workshops with Kidscape. Our “Boogie Babies” fun music sessions for toddlers will be returning from 25th January.
We’re providing training for people with lived experience of mental health conditions, in a peer mentoring course with The Advocacy Project.
Maternity Champions are trained, local volunteers who will be offering their support to new mums at our drop-in sessions called Café Mamma.
We’d also like to draw your attention to the two groups which entertained us at our 70th anniversary party: Doina Eastern European Folk Dance and our Westminster Freedom Choir.
Men’s Yoga - Contact Ian to register: 020 7227 0656 Tuesdays 6pm - 7pm at Thamesbank Centre Kidscape - ZAP Anti-Bullying Workshops From 4th February - contact [email protected]
Boogie Babies Fridays 10am - 10:50am
Westminster Freedom Choir Tuesdays 4pm - 5:30pm
Stop Smoking Support By appointment only. Contact Tania on 020 7227 0646
Doina Eastern European Folk Dance Tuesdays 7pm - 9pm
Café Mamma - Drop-In Sessions for New Mums Wednesdays 10am - 2pm at Bessborough Family Hub
For information on our current activities please visit community.theabbeycentre.org.uk, pick up a copy of our latest activity
leaflet from reception, or contact us at [email protected] ● 020 7222 0303
