Caritas Care’s Plungington Community Centre based in Preston is celebrating today after being awarded £25k per year for 5 years in funding from The National Lottery Community.

Plungington Community Centre will use their funding to strengthen and expand the Centre’s current services.

They want to reach out to the local community, the people who don’t currently access the Centre to seek out their thoughts and opinions on what they would be looking to want from their local community centre and what their needs and priorities are.

This new National Lottery funding will have an immediate impact on the centre by providing additional staff hours to create capacity to respond to people’s changing needs and crises in the face of the cost of living crisis.

Centre Manager, Ben Clayton said, “This funding will enable us to respond to the growing needs in our local community providing free, warm spaces and company as we head towards autumn and into winter. The Centre is a hub for the residents of Plungington, and we want to be able to provide information and guidance via numerous means, such as training and support in managing debt, reducing the risk of homelessness, or increasing our capacity to respond to food poverty through our weekly foodbank and Meet and Eat evenings.

“We want to encourage the residents of Plungington to come and see us to talk about what support they might need from the Centre. Our aim is to develop a Wellbeing Hub that is led by the people who need it and designed to tackle and support specific issues that they are facing in their everyday lives.

“We will be holding our first Health and Wellbeing event at the centre on Thursday 19 October from 11am to 3pm and want as many people to attend as possible to see first hand what we have on offer to our community and sample some of the activities that are available for everyone to access.”

Read more: See more about the Health and Wellbeing event

National Lottery players raise over £30 million a week for good causes across the UK. The National Lottery Community Fund distributes a share of this to projects to support people and communities to prosper and thrive.

Dale Tomlinson, Director of Community Services at Caritas Care said: “Thanks to National Lottery players, this grant means that we can support more people from all sectors of the local community to overcome some of their everyday struggles. Whether that be for some support and information on utility issues, creating a warm space, company and a chat in our Community Café or providing a warm meal at our Meet and Eat initiative. This will make a big difference to people’s lives.”

During the pandemic, in 2020 alone, The National Lottery Community Fund distributed almost £1 billion to charities and community organisations across the UK. Caritas Care are delighted to have received some of this funding to support a community that they have been working within for almost 90 years.

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