Target reached!
Increase the hours we are able to open with extra heating and support staff to work...
St Peter's Highfields Living Room
Leicester, United Kingdom
Cost of Living Boost
Donations to our project will be matched by the Cost of Living Boost up to the value of £250 to help us tackle the cost of living crisis.
Please note only one donation per supporter will be matched by the Cost of Living Boost. View the Terms & Conditions.
Aim
To provide a warm place for the community to feel at home, saving on the cost of heating their home during the day
Help us to create a warm space
Hi, we are St Peter's Highfields, a black majority Anglican church serving the deprived multi-ethnic area of Highfields in Leicester. We have a long history of serving and supporting our neighbours with numerous initiatives to help address local financial and health inequalities and providing a place for local families to meet together. We manage this through partnerships and help from people like yourselves.
Due to language and health barriers, many of our community are working on or the below minimum wage with multi generational families living in cramped housing conditions. Heating during the day for those left at home is not an option. For that reason, we aim to offer a safe, warm homely 'living room' for our community to come, get a hot drink and sit in comfort and without expectation - as they would at home.
We are near the end of completing the transformation of a previously unused area into a safe homily space to be used by the community for this purpose. Having secured funding and donations to create an area to work from (so that we have staff on hand) and to light, furnish and carpet the living room home from home area, we are nearly ready to go.
So, why do we need your help?
Well, to make it comfortable, we need to heat the area.
Since we started our project, the cost of heating has gone up so much that without help, we are not going to be able to achieve this on our own.
We are asking for your help to make this a warm area so that locals who are unable to heat their own homes will be able to come and sit and feel comfortable.
Who will come?
On Saturday's St Peters offer a space to our partners MLSS to serve hot take-away meals to locals in need. Over the last few weeks, we have been serving over 150 people per session. Many of these tell us that they cannot afford basic food let alone to heat their homes and that they would appreciate somewhere warm to be during the daytime. The guests vary greatly from homeless individuals to refugee families to locals on low wages - many of whom are migrants. 
Co-op Warm Spaces Funding Boost has provided £2,825 of match funding
Sovereign Network Group: Thriving Communities has provided £1,000 of match funding
Aviva Cost of Living Boost has provided £980 of match funding
This project successfully funded on 5th March 2023