Time running out for award-winning Centre
Drylaw Neighbourhood Centre seems set to close following confirmation that funding to run the Centre is to be slashed. Five members of staff will lose their jobs if the Centre – the only purpose-built community centre in the Inverleith ward – closes after having served the local community for twenty years.
Drylaw Neighbourhood Centre submitted two Grant Applications for the financial year 2016/17 – one to Health and Social Care and the other to Children and Families.
Alex Dale, who chairs Drylaw and Telford Community Association – the local voluntary organisation which oversees the running of the Neighbourhood Centre, explained: “We received a letter dated 18 December from the Health and Social Care department which advised that our application would not be recommended for support. This followed an earlier recommendation by Children and Families to cut our funding by 60%. No rationale has been offered for these decisions.”
He went on: “With no other significant sources of funding the Centre would have to close at the end of March, making five members of staff redundant.
“The loss of this Centre after twenty years service – the only community centre in the Inverleith ward – will have a major impact on our community, which is recognised as an area of multiple deprivation.”
Among the services likely to be lost is Drylaw Neighbourhood Centre’s breakfast club, which provides a nourishing meal for local children before school, and popular clubs for older people which encourage participation and reduce isolation. The centre also runs youth activities, a cookery group, award-winning gardening groups and has been the home of the local community council since it opened twenty years ago.
In a last-ditch appeal, the Centre’s management committee has written to councillors (see below) urging them to ‘stand side by side with Drylaw residents, the Centre’s hundreds of users, volunteers and it’s very small part-time team to enable us to continue to work in partnership – building and help maintain residents’ health and wellbeing and reduce marked inequality and deprivation in Drylaw and it’s surrounding areas.’
Before Drylaw Neighbourhood Centre was built the only community facilities in the local area were a community room in Ferryhill School and a general purpose room in Drylaw Parish Church. When Drylaw Neighbourhood Centre opened in 1995, through funding from the Pilton Partnership’s locally-managed Urban Panel, it became part of a growing family of community centres across the then Greater Pilton area: Drylaw joined Craigroyston, West Pilton, Royston Wardieburn and West Granton’s Prentice Centre as a venue where local community groups and organisations could meet and organise activities, and these well-used community centres were later joined by Muirhouse Millennium Centre.
Craigroyston has since gone: will it now be followed by Drylaw?
Details of how you can support the campaign to save Drylaw Neighbourhood Centre will be available on the Centre’s website at www.drylawnc.org.uk and on Twitter at @DrylawNC
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It’s terrible that there not getting the funding to keep the centre open. Maybe if the council didn’t waste money ie changing the speed limits to 20mph when they can’t enforce it in streets that are already 20mph. Then they could keep the centre open.
There will soon be nothing Community baaed in North Edinburgh.