RISE Social Enterprise Case Study Films

[Martin Hopkinson]
Mevagissey Activity Centre is actually the end product of work from two separate charities both based in Mevagissey. One is the ‘Mevagissey Playing Fields’ who hold the lease on all this land. There’s another charity in Mevagissey called ‘Mevagissey on the Move’ and their remit had always been to provide facilities particularly for younger people. Both charities had a vision. We started to think that infact the two charities working together had a much stronger vision than the two charities operating separately, and I think that’s been born out by events, the luck of the draw if you like, the mix of the people that the two charities put forward onto that committee did actually give us an extremely committed obstinate fighting group of people to put together what became quite a complex package.

[Steve Marshall] 01.00
The centre itself has three resident clubs, there’s a bowling club, a tennis club and a football club and they utilise the outside pitches. So the all weather bowling green, the tennis courts and the football pitches are used by those clubs. They all have their own development plans and those development plans incorporate trying to get more people in, particularly the younger people, to play their sport.

[Vernon Coombes]
You want to find out about the club right? We have normal club, what they call roll up sessions, Wednesday mornings and Thursday afternoons. Wednesday mornings…. (fade out)

[Man who helps run bowls club]
We as a bowls club help to get grants and everything to get the money to get actively built. We had a small place which was used by the bowls, the tennis, and the football which wasn’t in a fit state to be used and so on. We couldn’t get our club fully started and fully affiliated because our green was alright but the facilities that we had with it wasn’t enough to bring teams down, so yes, we backed the activity centre to the hilt.

[Female member]
It gets me out more because in four years I’ve never socialised very much. And I can come down here and play bowls twice a week, I can come to the salsa dancing, I can go to the activity centre where you can go in the gym. There’s so much going on it’s unbelievable.

[Another female member] (laughing)
I’ve got the 3rd one and the 4th. Jacks was back here. (Laughs)

[Male member]
Well we old aged pensioners, and really this enough energetic, I suppose, isn’t it, for us to do. Oh there’s lots of things in there. They got, next week we’ve got to have our eyes tested in there, so we’ve got the Doctors or whoever coming, yes. Jack and me is going in, he’s going in on the 21st, I got to go in on the 22nd. Oh no no, just routine, yes every year.

[Steve Marshall]
We’ve developed a strong link with the local surgery, so we’ll be getting referrals from the surgery. They’ve actually taken up one of our offices and they’re doing clinics from that office, and we’ll pick up some patients from there.

[Martin Hopkinson] 03.19
The centre is aimed at really the whole community and that’s not just Mevagissey. The Lottery have always referred to it as a hub centre and that’s a hub for Mevagissey but also the surrounding villages of Gorran, St Ewe, Pentewan. Downstairs you have facilities that are broadly funded by the Lottery Sport England, so they are predominantly linked to the sporting side of the total site, that’s not just the building but the whole site: the bowls, the tennis, and the football pitch, so there are changing rooms, there’s the multipurpose hall marked out for use primarily for badminton but also for indoor tennis and various other things. And there is the amenity room where we are talking now with a bar, and that actually links out through the doors to the bowling green and the tennis courts so again part of our plan always was to have people come through the centre to go to any of the activities on the site.
Upstairs we have really the community side of this project. We then have an IT training suite which is something we’ve always wanted to do as part really, not just for learning, but as part of a community commitment to help people actually get skills, qualifications to go into jobs. But equally you’ll see from some of the people there, they are doing it for leisure, learning and so on, so we are putting on a range of courses up there for that. There’s the kids drop in centre, we have a youth worker who works three hours a day, week days, term time, and we have a varying number of kids come in and there’s musical instruments in there, and it’s relaxed but it is also formal and planned.

[Saffron Martin] 05.09
I run the sports injuries clinic which is based in the referee’s room. I also work alongside the Mevagissey football team which is obviously based here… OK. What I’m going to do is ease your foot out to the side… I rent the room directly from the centre. They take a percentage of my takings in exchange for obviously the heating and the lighting and the facilities here that I have… How does that feel? Yeah that’s alright. Ok? Yeah…

[Martin Hopkinson] 05.45
One of the things we were very fortunate early on was through John Richings, who is a local business advisor, put us on to Sue Morrish at Co-Active in Plymouth, and Co-Active were remarkably helpful in getting us to focus on the structure. It was at the time we were putting the business plan together, and although you tend to be thinking of trying to raise the funding what I think Co-Active helped us to do was realise that, assuming you get your funding, you’ve then got to operate successfully thereafter, and getting us to focus on the company structure, how the directors would come to the centre, keeping it manageable and all the rest of it, and it was an extremely helpful piece of support from Co-Active and it was out of that that the advice came and the route came to go as a community interest company. And I still use Co-Active, the CIC articles and memorandum are considerably less onerous than a company limited by guarantee.

06.57
We employ a centre manager and we have an assistant manager come sport development officer. We then have three young ladies in the office who are all part time, but between them are two fulltime equivalent, and ultimately we foresee the need for other staff like if the bar really grows we will need probably dedicated bar staff, but at the moment we are trying to contain our costs to be met by our revenue.

(People laughing and saying bye.) 07.37
Obviously in a project of this nature the time scale tends to take longer than you ever thought so we have a relatively slow start-up. We anticipate in the first year requiring to generate about £90,000 of revenue, but our costs are greater than that so in fact we’ve always foreseen that our break even point is actually at the beginning of year four. (Laughing and glasses clashing) Now one of the major supports that we had when we realised that it was going to take us that long to break even was that the Lottery have also given us revenue support in addition to the capital funding and they are supporting us for the first three years to the tune of about £80,000 nearly. And that bridges the gap between the build up of our revenue and of course our costs that tend to kick off at the level that they are going to operate at.

[Residents of local community.] 08.26
Well I just think that this is what the village needs to pull itself together and to support the clubs that are going to emerge and grow from this particular centre.

[Another resident]
It is geared to satisfy particular needs within the village and I think it goes a very long way to doing just that.

[Female resident]
My husband’s come down for retinal screening. Before being able to come here we had to go further a field so it’s been a lot easier, and the facilities here seem to be absolutely fantastic.

[Previous resident]
The usage generally is increasing but we do want to expand the usage to the outlying villages as well. It was designed to do just that.

[Martin Hopkinson]
We are very conscious of the need to continue working with our funders, it doesn’t just end with the cheque so to speak. And part of the challenge to us I think is a determination to deliver what we set out to then as the reasons and the dream behind this building.