RISE Social Enterprise Case Study Films

[Neil Sturtivant]
Crewkerne Aqua centre is a centre that initially used to be a swimming pool with a teaching pool. We’ve extended last year and we now have a 30 station gymnasium, we have an activity room, we have palates, yoga and aerobic session like that, and we have three health pots which are used for health services like Desmond Training for Diabetes and mental health. The town council own this building, Crewkerne Leisure Management have a twenty-five year lease on the building itself. The new extension was part funded buy a Lottery grant for just over £500,000. We anticipate a turn-over this year around £400 to £450,000. Crewkerne Leisure Management is a limited company, it is also a registered charity, so we not make profit as such. Any surplus that we do make at the end of the year is ploughed back to ensure the leisure provision for Crewkerne. It is one of the ways that we were able to extend the building. When the building was extended they basically combined both parts of the lease into one, and made it twenty-five years again. Twenty-five years is very good to plan.
We are aiming the centre at everybody in the community really. We have children and we have lessons right up from when they have their second injection to people in their nineties both in the gym and in the swimming pool, from people that exercise everyday and come in swimming everyday, to people who come down once a month, once a week just for a leisurely swim, to people that actually take part in Iron Man and Triathlon competitions.

(Dynamic music) 02.20
We have 14 paid staff now. We also have the equivalent of another member of paid staff in part-timers. We work on a balanced budget. We look at our expected income for the year and we judge our expenditure or we plan our expenditure not to exceed that income or to be as close to that income as possible.

[Alison Mallett] 02.50
I run at the Aqua Centre a BLT class and then I follow on by a senior fit class, which is generally about having the people come in, have some fun, do a little bit of exercise, get the heart beating, then we do a bit of upper-body toning, then we go down onto the floor and do a bit of palates style movement. I also do palates here, I also do circuits here, do cover classes as well and I also do a senior fit class, Aqua Move on a Friday morning, and a pre and post-natal class following on with the babies on the side of the pool who normally scream and get a cuddle at the same time. So that’s great fun and very stressful.

[Neil Sturtivant] 03.30
We do apply for various grants form various bodies, ‘Awards for All’. They are designed to be for specialist uses: some people on income support for example or tax credits might not be able to afford some of the services. If we apply for a grant from ‘Awards for All’, we can then offer the service at a reduced rate so that it becomes more affordable for everybody.

[Alison Mallett] 04.05
My emphasis on exercise is not going in, slogging yourself out, and then drawing yourself and scraping yourself off the floor. It’s about having a bit of fun, having a bit of a social, and getting exercise at the same time.

We are open for over a hundred hours a week, and because of the income model we have that the expenditure is based on our income, we rely on a very tight staffing structure. So we can only really afford staff after we’ve proven the need for it, i.e. we have to get the income for that extra member of staff before we can employ them, which means that we always have relied on the dedication of staff, and the staff we have are really very special because they are able to go and do over the odds really of their work and they are really dedicated to the cause.

[Diane Butler] 05.08
(Alright now you’re all stars …laughter) I’m about to set out on one of our local health walks. We walk for about an hour and a quarter, it’s an approximate two mile walk, but it does vary and it will depend on the weather: if it suddenly rains we might have to curtail it a bit. The PCT co-ordinator that used to be at the Crewkerne Aqua Centre made general enquiries about someone perhaps helping out by doing some health walks. One of the members of staff knew I did a lot of walking and asked if I would get involved, so I did. So Tom, one of the gym instructors, and myself went on a training course with Somerset and we’ve been running them ever since.

[A walker]
Well, I think it’s a social gathering, something you look forward to, and an opportunity of meeting people and talking about all kinds of things while you are walking and also enjoying the beautiful scenery around Crewkerne.

[Another walker]
Walking’s important for all sorts of reasons but mainly for exercise because it’s so beneficial for every sort of exercise need that people have. So it’s good for stamina, it’s good for anybody who’s perhaps had an injury and is recovering, it’s good cardio-vascular exercise and people enjoy the sociability of going on these walks as well.

[Diane Butler]
We started off doing a twenty minute walk around the industrial estate keeping it all on the flat, but we are spreading our wings now. I’ve already had two of my walkers train as co-ordinators, and so we’re hoping to put on extra walks, or splitting off the walk that we do so that we’ve got a longer distance walk or a harder walk for the more able people, and a shorter and easier walk for the less able.

[Neil Sturtivant]
We have a very good relationship with the Primary Care Trust. One of the reasons we got the money form Sport England and we did this extension was we wanted to encourage the link between health and activity, and leisure, because a lot of reports have shown there is a link of people who become more active are seen less often. And I mean it always reminds me that the National Health Service is not the right name for it, it should be a National Sickness Service because when you’re ill you go and see a doctor, so you know it’s only when you’re sick that you use the services. We are trying to change that so that people come and access preventative services, so they come here when they are ill to actually stop them becoming ill, and to stop them actually needing to use other NHS facilities.

[Gill Lavers] 07.57
This is a cardiac rehab group, so they are all patients that have either had heart attacks, heart surgery, they’ve been to the hospital to be rehabilitated and this is what we call phase four where they’re rehabilitated in the community. I do cardiac-rehab at Yeovil hospital and someone from here actually contacted the rehab department at the hospital and I volunteered my services.

[A cardiac-rehab group member] 08.28
I had an operation last June, now it’s February, I think I’m fitter than I have been for years.

[Gill Lavers]
They’re doing cardio-vascular exercise; they’re programmed to start off with doing three minutes on all the CV equipment. We start off with a warm-up and stretches to just prepare the body for the exercise, then they’re doing like I say three minutes each piece of cardio-vascular equipment.

[Another cardiac-rehab member]
I went to Yeovil hospital for rehabilitation and then that sort of eventually sent us on here. We were doing this at Yeovil until this came into being, so now we can do it on our doorstep which is much nicer.

[His wife]
I’m my husbands’ carer and I can join with him, which means we can do things together hopefully keeping him fit, because we are both in our eighties now and we are just trying to keep fit.

[Neil Sturtivant] 09.44
We offer a wide variety of activities. Really we are open to anything that people want to do that is active or is beneficial for their health. We are looking along the lines of Sport England that we are trying to get people to exercise for thirty minutes or more five times a week, so the more activities we can offer the more likely people are to do it and not get bored with exercising. There is a great, I suppose, sort of habit people get into is they can get a bit stale of exercising the same thing so if they can do a variety of different things you can encourage them not to get bored with it.

[Sonia Bues] 10.27
We have two different projects going at the moment: one is a computerised therapy programme called CCBT, which is basically an eight week programme for people suffering from depression and anxiety to work on their individual problems; it is a less intense input than actual therapy but it has proven to be very effective and has received recommendation by various institutions. We also are hoping to run a group on self-esteem and assertiveness and doing some other outreach projects.
To be in a place like the Aqua-Centre is important because it’s easily accessible for people, it’s in the community where people are, people feel it’s a very friendly venue, feel that some of them they wouldn’t feel awkward about going to, it’s a much less stigmatised venue than other places where we used to work at. So far the feedback we’ve had has been very positive; they find it very accessible, very approachable, and so we’ve had comments like “well I can also combine it with other leisure activities after I’ve done my work with you” which we find is a very beneficial thing for people to do.

[Neil Sturtivant]
The close links with the primary care trust came about when in talks with Sport England we were looking at funding for the centre, and one of the things that Sport England are very keen on is innovative ways to combine health and sport and activity. So with that we started talks with our local primary care trust really by just sort of going and getting phone numbers and names and spending a lot of time looking around and who’s the appropriate person to talk to and how high up is the appropriate person. And after that is actually then finding time to talk to them and actually talk to them and explain to them the benefits of working in partnership, the benefits for them especially, and also the benefits for the community. It takes great courage I think for someone to start off doing exercise that hasn’t done exercise for a year or so. It’s getting people to take that first step, even if they just do something once a week. Once they start doing that for a few weeks they start to feel better and then just build it up slowly. Just start off really slowly and I think the challenge is to let people know this and that’s I think the challenge for every leisure provider.

[Service user]
Yes it’s helped, yeah, once you get going. (Laughs)