The Youth & Community Centre in Brooklands has not recovered since the pandemic. Caerphilly Council have allowed it to slowly decline in use and now the main user, who was Caerphilly Youth Service has decided to leave, there is now no budget to allow the centre to stay open.

Coupled with the dire need for housing across all areas, CCBC appear to be in favour of allowing the demolition of this purpose built centre in order to build new houses on the site.

However, we at Community Volunteers Wales (previously Risca Volunteers RCV UK), have been searching for a space where we can run the majority of our community projects since we began in March 2020.

CCBC have always been adamant that storing tables and chairs in various buildings across the Brooklands site was preferable to allowing us to run our wellbeing sessions from there.

Now that the building is no longer used we have approached the council asking them to consider allowing us to run it as a community wellbeing hub in partnership with the 3 existing groups still there.

We already work with a lot of organisations such as Aneurin Bevan, PoBL Housing, Social Services, Gwent Police, CCBC, Newport Council, and various independents like No Naff Art, Valleys Events, CCBC Multiply Project, GP Surgeries, Sgiliau, the Social Prescribing Project and many more. Most, if not all of them, have given us letters of interest confirming that in principle they would support our charity and in some cases, help with funding of new projects if we had the Brooklands Centre and were able to run our projects from there.

The 3 small existing groups who have been told to leave are also in favour of working with us to take over the running of the building.

Despite support from Cllr Bob Owen who has asked the officers at CCBC to meet with us, it seems to be impossible to get them to agree to meet face to face in order to present our plans to them.

You will have seen the hundreds of comments on social media from the general public objecting to the building being demolished and houses being built. The access road is congested, with cars parked both sides, allowing single lane traffic only in most stretches.

The local residents are also concerned about the lack of infrastructure for the additional people and cars that more housing will bring to the area.

We have supported local people of all ages throughout covid and actually the support we offer was needed even before the pandemic changed the world. We are sometimes the only interaction some people have from one week to the next. Imagine how much more we could do with this centre available to us in one form or another.

Please sign our petition to let CCBC know that we, as a community, want to save the centre and that they should agree to meet face to face to understand what we can offer.

About our charity:

Launched in March 2020 when we offered shopping, prescriptions and telephone calls to the elderly and vulnerable in our area. We now run projects out of 3 venues, these include The Snug, a community coffee shop, The Pantri, an affordable shopping experience tackling waste food and the cost of living crisis. Plus social activities from Channel View Community Centre, coffee mornings, breakfast clubs, free evening meals, a bicycle hub. Also two Tin on a Wall projects, which help sustain the Pantri and local foodbanks, transport to health appointments, a youth club and social prescribing which helps people re-engage with others improving mental health and well-being. There are many more projects we run, too numerous to mention but all now essential and relied upon by the community.

We have over 200 volunteers registered with us, we make 170 kindness calls per week, we distributed enough food last year to give 56,000 meals to the community; including our Christmas project and our care packs which we gave to our elderly and vulnerable VIP’s we have re-distributed in excess of £350,000 worth of items over the past year.

We receive referrals from CCBC, ABUHB, GP’s, Social Services, Gwent Police and many other agencies, in order to support residents within the borough of Caerphilly. Being on the border of Newport, our reach is quickly growing into that area too.