A home for community and voluntary groups in Brighton and Hove

2004 to 2009

Between April 2004 and March 2009 we made significant improvements to our building and services while providing real help to hundreds of local charities and community groups. In this time we

  • provided a home to 43 community and voluntary groups
  • listed rooms and halls for hire at 56 local community centres on Brighton and Hove venue search
  • listed volunteering opportunities with 143 local community and voluntary groups on Brighton and Hove volunteer search
  • provided a postal address to 18 local community groups
  • hired our South Wing conference room to 93 charities and community groups.

Our building and its facilities

Between 2004 and 2009 we significantly improved the environment people experience at Community Base while making our building more sustainable. This involved

  • installing new lighting and ceilings throughout our building
  • improving our frontage with new doors, an improved window display and a new banner display
  • creating a room for our photocopier and a small meeting room for one-to-one meetings
  • improving our coffee room by getting comfier chairs
  • making our conference room a throwaway free zone by providing good old-fashioned plates and cutlery and banning paper and plastic throwaway ones
  • installing solar panels to help heat our water
  • taking our responsibility as a community organisation to reduce our carbon footprint seriously, leading to a reduction in our electricity use between 2004 and 2008 of 15%.

Life at Community Base

Between 2004 and 2009 we continued to encourage the creation of a community within Community Base to which everyone can belong. This involved

  • maintaining an email group for people at Community Base to communicate with each other
  • improving our website to make information for people in the building more accessible and easier to understand
  • establishing monthly participant group meetings where anyone working at Community Base can raise issues of concern with Community Base staff
  • running weekly yoga classes
  • organising events such as pub quizzes and xmas parties for people working at Community Base
  • holding open days in May 2006 and April 2008 where the public could find out about the work of groups at Community Base and people in the building could meet each other
  • hosting discussions during refugee week every year since 2004 entitled Refugees – they’re welcome here! where local refugees, professionals and activists got together to discuss issues of mutual concern
  • organising a review into the way Community Base is run in 2007 that led to a number of policy improvements and clarified Community Base’s core identity as a home for community and voluntary groups rather than other types of organisations
  • hosting occasional working lunches where people from local community and voluntary groups have got together to discuss issues such as fundraising, unions in the voluntary sector, internet security and reducing your organisation's environmental impact with a guest speaker over a spot of free lunch
  • celebrating our tenth birthday in July 2007 by making a short film Welcome to Community Base for our website, inviting the Mayor of Brighton and Hove to cut our birthday cake and having a party!

On 2nd August 2006 Community Base suffered a huge loss with the death of Sue Cole, our receptionist since we opened in 1997. Sue's good humour and caring approach to others was the public face of Community Base to the thousands of people who visited or worked at Community Base during the nine years she was our receptionist. On 17th August 2006, Sue's birthday, we had a gathering at Community Base to celebrate Sue's life and her contribution to Community Base and the local community.

Our services to the local community

Between 2004 and 2009 we continued to develop our services to the local community in response to grassroots need and hosted events promoting the work of the local community and voluntary sector. These included

  • maintaining our reception as a welcoming and accessible source of information for local people. The number of enquiries at our reception, excluding visitors to groups in the building, has risen substantially over the last five years from 1,800 in 2004 to 2,800 in 2008
  • publishing our free annual poster guide to community services in Brighton and Hove. This guide has established itself as a unique, easy to use source of information about basic local community services across the city. In 2005 we increased the number of languages we translate the guide into to twelve - Arabic, Bengali, Czech, Farsi, French, Lithuanian, Mandarin, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak and Spanish. In January 2009 we doubled our guide’s print run to deal with increased demand for the guide as a result of the credit crunch
  • creating Brighton and Hove volunteer search in 2007. This innovative, free and genuinely sustainable community resource lets potential volunteers browse hundreds of regularly updated volunteering opportunities with local community and voluntary groups for 40 hours a week in our reception or 24/7 on our website. According to a survey carried out in January 2008 Brighton and Hove volunteer search helped 40 local community or voluntary groups recruit over 70 volunteers in its first six months
  • redesigning our website to bring together our three online information services - Brighton and Hove volunteer search, Brighton and Hove service search, the expanded online version of our poster guide to local services, and Brighton and Hove venue search, which helps people find local venues for hire
  • promoting our information services widely in the local community with posters, postcards and other media
  • providing a high quality, affordable conference room in the heart of Brighton for the use of local community groups and charities. In 2008 we reduced the cost of our 100 seater conference room to charities and community groups not licencing space at Community Base from £10 an hour to £5 an hour, the rate paid by groups licencing space in our building, and have seen a significant increase in the use of the room by these groups as a result
  • providing free support services to local community and voluntary groups not licencing space at Community Base including help with fundraising and a free postal address
  • holding essay competitions for local school students in 2005 and 2006
  • setting up and running Green Champion 2008, a campaign bringing together community and voluntary groups in Brighton and Hove willing to make ten practical commitments to fight climate change
  • restarting publication of our newsletter Community Base news in 2008 in a full colour format to promote our services and the activities of groups at Community Base.