We’ve had some great news – The National Lottery Community Fund has accepted our application and has given The Village London a whopping £10,000 to help our community thrive!
This is a big deal for us as it means we can spend more time on the project and reach out further to parents and carers in the community that may need us.
In our next phase, we will use these funds to strengthen what we have in place already, providing a solid foundation to expand and offer more services.
Just to give you an idea of how quickly things have happened around here, we thought we’d share some stats with you…
The idea to set up a community well being hub for parents went live on Instagram just 11 months ago In September 2020.
We hadn’t anticipated we would start our activities so quickly but due to many new parents feeling isolated during the 2nd lock down, we started the Walk & Talks – our community started to grow from here.
Since our 1st in October, we’ve had over 80 parents joining our walks. We’ve helped to initiate some great friendships through these walks and we are so happy we were able to provide this much needed support for new parents when nothing else was going on.
By the beginning of December 2020 we were up to a team of 7, most of whom had never met before and were brainstorming and planning over zoom and on park benches in the freezing cold. By the end of the month, we officially registered as a company and called ourselves The Village London CIC. (CIC stands for Community Interest Company).
In January 2021 we picked up the keys to the gorgeous Corbett library and Community Centre and in February 2021 we served our first customers who came to see Women’s health Physiotherapist Sarah Parker.
24th March 2021 was our soft opening and we started to provide support for new parents with our Infant Feeding Support sessions and On Parenthood sessions. A few weeks later we celebrated with the community at our official launch day on 14th April 2021 where we got to meet so many new parents at our classes indoors and with the activities we hosted outdoors.
As of today’s date, we now have an audience of 1226 through our Instagram account and 420 on our mailing list. AND, we have welcomed exactly 400 parents through our doors who have traveled from 18 different postcodes to use our services!
We are over the moon at the support we have received so far from customers, volunteers, advisors, practitioners, third party organisations and the community.
Thank you for helping us get here and we look forward to working with you more over the coming months and years!
Much love,
The Village Team
