Stoke St Milborough is a village in South Shropshire with a long history and a thriving rural community. Our aim for 2025 and beyond is to ensure that we continue to function as a viable community by...
- making sure that as many people as possible know who we are, where we are and what we have to offer
- making sure that the community spaces upon which we rely to maintain social cohesion are well maintained, comfortable and fit for purpose in the 21st century
With these aims in mind, we have developed a website www.stokestmilborough.info which is run by a team of unpaid volunteers in their free time. The costs of hosting the website amount to £177 for two years. Initially, we hope to raise enough money to cover these costs through this funding campaign. This will enable us to offer free advertising on the site to local businesses, as well as free access to all website visitors to all of the information within it.
Our ambition does not stop with the creation of the website. The team behind it is also actively involved in our main community space Stoke St Milborough Village Hall (Registered Charity Number: 201158)
With energy prices vastly increased since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the knock-on effects for the Village Hall and the Church have been significant in terms of heating and other energy use. This makes it difficult to bring in enough money to pay the bills whilst also maintaining the buildings and making improvements.
To address this problem, the Committee of Stoke St Milborough Village Hall has teamed up with the Shropshire Warm Welcome and Marches Energy Agency to operate as a Warm Hub from March 2025. We have already received a grant for £2750 from Marches Energy Agency to help us get started with a Creative Community Cafe, which will take place on the first Monday of each month from 2pm to 5pm. Marches Energy Agency will then work with us to come up with a strategy to make the village hall much more energy efficient, which will explore the options of installing solar panels, and air-to-air heat pump and/or improved insulation. You can view the recommendations of the independent Energy Feasibility Study here.
To get the energy improvements underway, we have been given a very generous donation of £5000 from the Alan and Karen Grieve Charitable Trust. All we need now is to provide potential contractors with the results of our Energy Feasibility Study and then get quotations for the proposed improvements. The MEA will point us towards other funding sources once we know a total cost for the project, but in the meantime, donations from the local community will provide a great indicator that the locals wish to support and retain the Village Hall as part of a sustainable future for the community. Please, therefore, if you are someone who already uses the village hall, or would like to if it were warmer and more comfortable, then you can show your support with a donation to this crowdfunder.
If we go beyond our total, we can then discuss other local projects that could benefit from our extra fundraising.
Thank you for your generosity in supporting us!
The team at Stoke St Milborough Online