Where facilities are additional to the area or have been out of use, it is particularly important to plan ahead for their first few years. It is easy to underestimate the challenges of setting up new organisations or taking on new spaces. This is partly the technical aspects of a smooth handover from a contractor but more about the additional costs and risks involved. Again, this is more important for community and voluntary organisations, who don’t have the management capacity and back-up of large organisations. Sufficient resources and support need to be made available to new facilities and organisations to help them settle in.
In EC1, there is a housing estate which contained an old office that had been empty for many years. With support from EC1 NDC and the housing organisation (Peabody), it was brought back to life as a multi-functional community space. The community development team from the housing association worked with the tenants and residents association to build their capacity to run the space and provided a number of small grants for activities.
