Warm Your Cockles Community Hub

Aim

A place to go for people who are struggling or in need of a friendly face and a warm welcome. Nonjudgmental support, free food and drink.

Who are we?

We are a community children’s charity supporting local preschool children and their families. We provide day care, family support and tailored specialist provision for children with special needs and disabilities.

Our community facility houses a community café, community fridge and meeting place. We run a variety of groups that support the changing needs of our community. 

This year our charity is 30 years old and we celebrate the hundreds (possible thousands of children and families we have been fortunate to work with and support over the years.

Community impact

Set-up in 1993 and managed by the community, DCN delivers high-quality, flexible and affordable childcare and family support service for children 0-5years and their families. 

Our community led ethos has gained us a reputation of trust, helping break down barriers and make stronger community links.  

In an area of deprivation where outcomes for children are lower than the national average and emphasis is on narrowing the gap between disadvantaged children and others, we actively engage parents, helping to break cycles of low attitudes and aspirations, contributing to the overall aim of ensuring every child is ready for school and life.

We believe that every child deserves the same opportunities to prepare them for adulthood and that means not only providing the best experience we can for ALL our children but to provide a supporting welcoming place where parents and families feel valued and respected.

Our well attended parents groups run weekly and our community cafe and communty fridge is popular with local residents. Our nursery and special needs unit provide tailored support for children with moderate to severe special needs. There is a high demand for places and we a consistently full. Many children and families that attend our services are on low income or the most vulnerable.

Why are we crowdfunding?

Darnall is in the bottom 30% most deprived areas in England and has the 3rd highest ward percentage of children living in poverty. In the current economic crisis people are struggling and we want to do our bit to help our community.  We know from the work we do with our families that more and more are using food banks. Parents are going without food so that they can feed their children. We also know from our experiences that there is big difference between those families that have and those that don’t and we want to be able to  help our most vulnerable children to have the same experiences as others. Many of our children don’t eat regular healthy nutritional meals, that are essential to health growth and development and we want the change that for our children and take some of the pressure off already struggling parents.

How we’ll spend the money raised

We want to make free meals a regular opportunity for all our vulnerable children and families that access our community café and nursery. Our café will be a warm hub where the community can come more frequently to access a warm space with a friendly face. Nutritional food cooked and served by our volunteers will provide every child that attend s nursery more access to free meals at nursery and those who visit our community café will benefit for more regular free meals. We are currently funding our free community Cafe/warm hub through volunteers, small donations, and surplus food items but these are limited and not guaranteed. We would like to raise funds so that we can establish more permanent regular supplies of ingredients/food items and to cover the costs of cooking the food. We want to be able to offer a consistent and regular service that will really make a difference those most in need.

This project successfully funded on 24th April 2023