Community resources, Gloucestershire Resource Centre and City Works, Gloucester

Mixed use strength

City Works' strength lies in its diverse range of service providers and users. Organisations based here now include:

• the Cool Running Kids Club (an after school and holiday childcare scheme)
• the Dementia Care Trust
• Co-operative Futures (providing support for the development of co-operatives and social enterprises across Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, Swindon and Wiltshire)
• GymNation (a community and multicultural gymnasium and fitness training group)
• Time Banks UK

The local development trust also manages office units for business start-ups and community groups. 'Since completion in October 2000 the units have all been fully occupied,' says Lin Mathews, managing director of Gloucestershire Resource Centre. 'We generally have a waiting list of projects wanting to locate here.'

Gloucestershire Resource Centre also offers support to teachers, carers, play and youth workers involved in a huge variety of creative activities across the county. Resources include the Scrapstore, where a supermarket trolley can be filled with card, foam, fabric, cones and reels, all for £7. This resource is used by schools, art clubs, kids clubs, play schemes and community projects throughout the county. This year over 190 tons of business waste have been collected from over 60 businesses and re-distributed for use in creative projects by the Scrapstore.

The Art Shop supplies a full range of affordable essentials for community and educational art projects, such as Cinderford Artspace, Nature in Art and White City Adventure Playground. This makes the resource centre a time saving one-shop stop for busy teachers and youth workers. They can also hire equipment for many arts projects that might otherwise be beyond their normal budget including, screen printing, badge making and circus skills workshops.

Multicultural educational materials including books and costumes are also available. In June 2004 a special one day event was held called Kifani (a Swahili word meaning 'unique'). This provided teachers and play leaders with information, workshops and discussion on creative ways of approaching issues of varying cultures and active citizenship. An early years worker described Kifani as 'an experience I will never forget and it made me realise how important different cultures really are'.

There are many other workshops, led by professional artists, giving both training and networking opportunities to those working with creative learning in a number of fields.

City Works provides accessible venues - art rooms, dance studio, office and workspaces, meeting rooms, events spaces and a café area for a variety of community groups across a broad spectrum. This mix of people and resources in a friendly and pleasant environment has fed the creative inspiration of users. 'City Works is a great place, some of our best work has been made here,' says Jacky Pool, director of Gloucestershire Dance. Office and work spaces are normally let on licence. This recognises that start-up businesses and community groups sometimes find it hard to commit to a long term contract.

Membership of the Gloucestershire Resource Centre provides access to low cost art materials to any arts, play education or community organisation. All they need to do is take some form of identification such as local authority registration, letterhead or proof of charitable status into the centre. The annual subscriptions depend on the status of the member organisation, but typically range from £15 to £150. Once they have joined, groups can authorise members to use the centre as often as they need to.

Setting up the centre

Gloucestershire Resource Centre is a well established educational and environmental charity that has been expanding creative re-use of materials and waste reduction in the county since 1986. By the mid 1990s the need for extra space was pressing. It was decided that by raising funds to buy and adapt a large premises for multiple uses they could turn the financial drain of having to pay rent into income - by providing premises suitable for a range of other groups.

The City Works site was bought in December 1995. Initially the plan was to refurbish the whole of the site as soon as they moved in, but the Arts Lottery Board assessors were concerned that the project was over ambitious. 'Naturally we were quite disheartened at the time,' remembers Lin Mathews. 'But with hindsight this was the best thing to happen. It meant that we then progressed carefully in phases.'

Although the staging of the development into distinct phases was not part of their initial vision, the organisation turned this practical necessity into a strength. It used each phase as a pilot to test and prove the demands to be met by the next. 'We were able to be more flexible and respond to what was needed by the local community,' says Lin Mathews. This has enabled the planning of City Works facilities and services to be acutely sensitive to the needs of users and potential users and to demonstrate those needs to potential funders. 'One example of this is that, in the beginning, we thought we would provide a nursery. But over time it became clear that what local people really needed was a good centrally-located out-of-school club. We have been able to work with the Cool Running Kids Club to provide that here.'

The dance studio is another project that was not in the original plans. 'It was only through meeting other local groups during the early phases of the project that the need for an accessible dance studio came to our attention,' says Lin Mathews. ' Now we have the biggest, and best, facility in the county.'