Our centre has been based at 55 Clifford Street for 40 years. It's homely, cosy and has allowed us to deliver amazing support to the women of Chorley and South Ribble. We are in a great location easily accessible by road and rail and close to all of Chorley's town centre amenities. 

​

However the one downside was that we were not accessible, having only one bathroom which was upstairs. So this seriously limited our offering. So, we love our building but want to be accessible and more inclusive, what can we do?

​

Our chair recognised the need to make our services accessible and set about discovering if it would be possible and feasible to adapt our existing building. We drew up some plans and got some quotes in and secured the services of a project manager from Regicide to support us.

Good news! It was possible! 

We closed for the holidays mid December 2024 and we made a plan for relocating all our services while our building was closed. 

​

Meg at Health at Heart graciously agreed to host two of our counselling days, meaning that our student therapists could keep working towards their qualifications and our clients who needed face to face sessions could still access these. Some of our counsellors moved to remote working, providing sessions by phone and video.

​

Calico Lounge in Chorley offered to host our Tuesday morning sessions in January and gave us a space for volunteer training in the afternoons. We ran a walk and talk group (weather dependent) around Chorley on Friday mornings and ran a group at Primrose Gardens in the afternoon.

​

In February our journaling and knit and natter sessions ran from Inspire Youth Zone who were excellent hosts.

We had a great time in our community locations and thank everyone who attended and supported us. We were pleased to be able to continue offering a warm, welcoming service while our centre was renovated. 

This is your Project description. Provide a brief summary to help visitors understand the context and background of your work. Click on "Edit Text" or double click on the text box to start.

So it's possible but how can we fund it? We'd already had some amazing partnerships and events in 2024 which gave us a head start. However we were still short of our total. So we worked with Lancashire County Council to apply for the Sport and Culture Fund, which also enabled us to use Spacehive's crowdfunding platform.

​

This meant that as well as receiving some statutory funding we could raise money in our community.

​

So we set about launching an ambitious campaign to reach the £25,000+ that we needed. We created a video, a web page and a detailed project plan. 

​

We went live in October 2024 and the hard work of promoting the campaign began. Donations came in and we were successful with our funding from Lancashire County Council. We held some events including a Christmas Wreath Making workshop, ran a tombola and campaigned hard.

​

We hit our target in December 2024 and this project was turning from dream to reality!

Our contractors started work on the 6th January 2025. 

​

The first stages were to 

This is your Project description. A brief summary can help visitors understand the context of your work. Click on "Edit Text" or double click on the text box to start.