You may not be aware yet, but East Brighton Trust teamed up with The Resource Centre last year to offer support to groups in the East Brighton area.

The Resource Centre is a charity serving voluntary and community groups across Brighton and Hove. The Centre has been in existence since 1975 and is used by around 1000 different local groups every year, from playgroups to environmental campaigns, residents associations to arts organisations.

In addition to having supported them through our small grants scheme in the past, we recognised a need for support specifically for the groups we fund in East Brighton and were happy to set up a provision with the Resource Centre to offer this. The provision can help groups with a number of activities such as filling in grants applications, writing constitutions, examining their accounts and complying with monitoring requirements to us, our partners at Sussex Community Foundation and other grant-giving organisations they may be receiving funds from.

Between January and June 2017, the Resource Centre supported fourteen different community groups in East Brighton with this funding that we provided. These are all grassroots community groups which are run by and for the local community. Resource Centre support aims to help groups find solutions to issues they are grappling with, and are therefore tailor-made to each group. This supports consisted of a mixture of planned sessions as well as “quick support” – enabling groups to get instant support by phoning in to the centre.

The groups receiving assistance have expressed how grateful they have been for the support. Moulsecoomb Local Action Team fed back to the Resource Centre that “it’s nice to know that you are there for local groups. Staff are always very friendly and helpful. Very valuable service.” And the local Drama drop-in gave specific feedback on the help they had received: “We were given very thorough guidance on the difference between CIC, Charitable Trusts and community groups and how this would affect our progression for our drama club group. We were enabled to see the pros and cons of each option in relation to taking our work forward. The support was thorough and done in a way that enabled us to understand the implications of following each option. We were also given hand-outs to look at and referred to websites for further information.”

The Resource Centre provides vital services to communities in our city and last year was selected as one of the Brighton & Hove Mayor’s chosen charities as well as recently celebrating its 40^th birthday as you can see in the photo above! You can head to our website find out more details about the East Brighton Trust funded support for the Resource Centre and do get in touch with them to find out how they might be able to help your group.