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Short History
Ryecroft NRC is a charity that serves one of the most deprived area’s in the UK. We began in 2000 to meet the needs of the community and remain at the centre of the community.
We rely on a dedicated team of volunteers and trustees to run the charity on a day to day basis and oversee projects. Up until the pandemic, the charity had grown year on year, helping to set up 15 social businesses by providing low cost incubating units for rental and mentoring the new businesses. Using the money generated to deliver community projects, we have had massive success, with up to 10,000 visits per month to the centre.
During the Covid-19 pandemic
Innovation
The centre came in to its own during the pandemic. We created an Android application (Coronavirus Help) that has been downloaded by the community over 6000 times. The app was created by our over 70's IT group and completed remotely after they were forced to shield and remains the only non WHO app on the Android Play store approved by Google.
The app takes all of the information from various trusted sources and puts it in one place that also translates in to over 100 languages. We also created a Covid-19 resonse page on our website that was viewed over 20,000 times per month at the hight of the pandemic.
Further help for the community
When we were asked by the council to deliver food parcels to shielding residents. Not only were our small team of three volunteers able to deliver almost 3000 parcels, but we also carried out consultations with the residents and were able to respond to additional requests for hot meals, delivering over a thousand meals during lockdown. We also teamed up with market traders in our neigbouring town of Dudley who donated fresh fruit and veg to help make the food parcels more nutritious.
Next Steps
During this exercise, we held several conversations with residents and discovered that there were many complex needs arising as a result of lockdown. This project looks to provide additional support to our community by training volunteers to befriend residents unable to leave their houses, offer energy saving advice and provide benefit check referrals. We hope to fund a small call centre to help with additional advice and create an app to support the community. The area has many residents who still remain on furlough from minimum wage jobs, This is causing extreme worry, as losing 20% of income means they now are unable to meet household bills. This will be further exacerbated if jobs are lost after the Government support is removed.
We offer a wide range of employability, and unique training opportunities to help retrain members of the community with the aim being to help set up micro businesses that people can run from home.