Thorpe Hamlet rECOvery Hub

Aim

To establish an Eco-Community Hub resource for local people, achieving more sustainable living through a variety of creative, practical ways

Who we are
A new initiative, the rECOvery Hub will expand and connect the work done at St Matthew's Recovery Church with an ethnically diverse group of women, young children and families and Norfolk Clubhouse, a charity working with adults 18 and over, living with mental health needs. Our vision is to deepen and widen our collaborative work with other beneficiaries in the locality such as prison leavers, those recovering from addictions and older children and families in the area in the creation of a sustainable resource, developing skills and abilities and collaboratively tackling economic and social issues connected to climate change.

Our Vision

Our vision is to create a rECOvery Hub to be a resource for the local community and surrounding areas to promote practical and creative ways of living more sustainably and to tackle at a grass roots level the difficulties we will all be facing economically and socially around climate change. 

We envision the rECOvery Hub to be a source of inspiration and connection for individuals, groups and organisations in the area and beyond, becoming an intentional community of people who take responsibility to care for and love where they live. 

What we will do

We aim to buy a shed/workshop to establish an Eco-Barn, in addition to purchasing tools, fruit trees and bushes and water saving equipment.  We will make things from upcycled and recycled materials including bird/bat boxes, bug-hotels and hedgehog homes for use around the immediate area, to improve wildlife habitats, creating a Community Garden including fruit trees and bushes. 

We will pilot a Community Cafe, utilising food grown to provide social connection. We aim in the long term to devise and deliver cooking/food projects for organisations and individuals in the community, providing education around sustainable living. This includes sharing practical resources to reduce food and energy poverty, and to ensure that nobody struggles alone in facing these challenges. We want to be a place where people can share their anxieties, feel less alone whilst being a place to share ideas and resources to help alleviate these anxieties in a practical, can-do way.

The rECOvery Hub will be a resource for the whole community and surrounding areas to provide education, training and practical ways of living more sustainably in relation to consumption, food growing and cooking, energy and water consumption and waste reduction. It will maximise the use of existing resources, both human, natural and man made to prevent or alleviate food and energy poverty, prepare for any shortages of resources and protect existing resources from further loss or exploitation.

The rECOvery Hub will facilitate a system wide approach to connecting the good work already being done by existing groups in the area to green our communities, being a resource for information sharing, advice, signposting and a platform for sharing of volunteers and practical items such as tools within a Library of Things and a Seed Bank.

By upskilling and connecting individuals and groups in the community we will help to create new work opportunities and social connections, building resilience at a whole community level as well as building resilience for specific persons within it. Both are necessary to sustain positive and lasting change, because everything and everyone is connected.

'People look at a place they love and say to each other: ''Somebody ought to do something about this." Then they realise: "Oh God, it's us, isn't it?"' Simon Barnes

This project successfully funded on 20th September 2022