This is an exciting time Hungerford Youth & Community Centre as our brand-new kitchen will be fitted out in the summer holidays. It is going to look fabulous. Big thanks to Hungerford architects’ Orange Key Design Studios, who kindly donated David Moore’s services to design the finishing touches.

He really understood our brief and came up with some great cost effective ideas incorporating an industrial loft apartment feel, bringing the colour blue in whilst affording space for the children to get creative with art. The kitchen is also based on an off the shelf system, tied together with various types of wood panelling, white painted brick, lots of artificial light as well, particularly in the storage area that could become café seating. The space will be able to remain flexible for multiple function types as well.

We have many plans for our new kitchen:

• Our existing youth clubs will be able to run healthy eating workshops. This is especially important to #ICE – a youth club for children with additional needs. They will use the kitchen to teach basic cooking skills to young people in order to prepare them for independent living.
• We also want to co-ordinate food collections in partnership with FareShare so that volunteers can gather once a month and prepare meals for the elderly and for vulnerable families. Meals will be delivered, creating a web of community links.
• Groups will be able to book the kitchen specifically for healthy food projects: for example cooking for families on a budget – cooking for students, etc.
• We will hold cafe sessions for groups such as young carers, mothers with post natal depression, people suffering from depression, people living with dementia.

This project has been made possible by a massive £24,000 at Greenham Trusts’s Pitch to the Panel 2017. We are also delighted to have received funding from Town and Manor of Hungerford, Hungerford Town Council, The Gerald Ward Charitable Foundation and Miss W.E. Lawrence Charitable Settlement.

It means a great deal to have such tangible and significant demonstrations of confidence from these local benefactors. Their support has been and is, we believe, absolutely fundamental in enabling the continued good work for our youth and community.

Hungerford Youth and Community Centre really is all about a community effort. With such support behind us we have decided to start work on another ambitious project – to create a charity whose sole aim is to extend Hungerford and District’s youth services.

This is a big decision for us and will involve much planning and fundraising to make it possible, but the
intended outcome will be a youth service which extends [as in the past] to outlying but adjacent villages including Lambourn and Kintbury, offering youths such opportunities as training and leadership courses, subsidised outward bound activities and much more.

This is the start of the further upwards curve for youth services in Hungerford, after many years of
successive government cuts. We hope it will represent another good news story for our community.