Keep the campaign rolling... let's make Lewisham's first community owned music venue happen!
We're Sister Midnight, and since 2021 we’ve been campaigning to open the first community owned music venue in Lewisham.
We believe that everyone should have a great music venue in their neighbourhood, which is why we’re working to open our venue in Catford in 2024, where we will champion local talent, bring people together to celebrate the wealth of creativity that lewisham is home to.
Since we started our campaign we’ve achieved a huge amount...
- We’ve raised over £300K through community investment, with more than 950 local people buying a share in sister midnight and becoming members of our co-operative society.
- We’ve put on 17 fundraiser gigs with over 80 local artists and DJs.
- And most importantly, we’ve secured a 10 year rent-free lease on a former working mens club in Catford, which will be home to our new community venue!
Our new venue in Catford (pre-renovation)
But now we need your support to help continue our work...
Running a project of this scale is expensive, and since we started this campaign, we’ve managed to cover all of the running costs of the project through grants, donations, and income from our fundraiser events. This is no mean feat, and we’re so proud to have got as far as we have, but things are taking a little longer than we’d planned for and our project funds are now close running out.
It’s important to us that the £300K that we’ve raised through share investment as a community remains ring fenced, meaning we’ll only spend this money on the direct costs of renovating our building.
So, if we want to keep working towards opening lewisham’s first community owned music venue, then we desperately need to raise funds to cover our core costs for the rest of this year.
(Lottie & Lenny from the Sister Midnight core team, hard at work!)
It costs us around £4K per month to run our campaign. These costs include:
- Between £3-£3.5K of staff wages per month (this is for 2 part time roles, but on top of this we work approximately 136 unpaid hours per month, and will continue to do so because that's what it takes to get all the work done!)
- £125 IT & Software costs (such as web hosting, graphic design software, and member management software)
- £125 campaign costs (such as printing, promotion of our share offer)
- £250-£750 on professional fees (such as architects fees, engineers, surveying, or accountancy)
We're asking for your support to raise £12K over the next 3 months to cover our costs in October, November, and December.
If we can raise this much, we'll be able to fund the following vital steps needed to push our project forwards:
- Complete detailed design work for the venue (RIBA Stage 4 ), and prepare to start renovation works in 2024
- Applying for grant funding, particularly for our core costs to ensure that we can get through 2024 without the need for further crowdfunding
- Marketing our community share offer to raise more funds towards the cost of renovating our building!
Every donation will bring us closer to opening Lewisham’s first community owned music venue. We’re too close to give up, let's see this through to the end together!
(This is a donations based Crowdfunder, and is separate to our community share investment scheme. Pledges made here are not a share investment in Sister Midnight, and are not repayable. If you would like to buy a share and become a member of Sister Midnight, please do so here.)