Gatis receives grant for summer of wellbeing activities
Congratulations to local community hub Gatis Community Space who are busy putting plans together for a summer of wellbeing activities after receiving a grant of £9750 from the Severn Trent Community fund.
The new outdoor classroom at Gatis Community Space on its first use by Wolves Play Café, it was built by Design Craft Exhibitions Ltd and funded by Millennium Point Trust and Severn Trent Community Fund
The grant has enabled the group, working in partnership with Wolves Play Café, to create a new outdoor classroom space in the wilderness area of the centre and offers opportunities to run many more outdoors based activities with a focus on wellbeing and nature.
Gatis Community Space has been operating for 6 years and is run by a mix of self employed community members and volunteers. They run a range of projects and activities from The Real Junk Food Project Wolverhampton, which has been delivering surplus food boxes to over 200 families per week during the current pandemic to online yoga and meditation sessions. Their mission is to support their diverse community by providing a safe and welcoming space where community can come together to share, play and learn.
The funding not only contributes to the new classroom but will also provide much needed resources to improve the grounds including loose parts play equipment for the children, renovations to the water play area and equipment to allow rainwater harvesting from the roof spaces.
In addition to this the group are planning a Summer Wellbeing Festival which, due to current covid restrictions, will run from 24th July to 12th September and be a mix of online and face-to+face wellbeing activities for all ages and abilities and will include yoga, meditation, art, nature, confidence building and goal setting. They hope to share the full programme of events by mid-July.
During this festival they will review which activities have the most impact on wellbeing for their local community and develop additional regular sessions for the remainder of the year.
Maria Billington, founder of Gatis Community Space says “We are absolutely delighted to receive this funding. With our partnership with Wolves Play Café we have been able to jointly fund the building of the outdoor classroom space which has a huge impact on the amount and range of activities we can run from this space. This really helps cement the future of the centre and offers opportunity for long-term sustainability. We are very excited about the Wellbeing Festival and have brought together a team of local self employed experts to deliver the activities, our focus is to support the covid recovery wellbeing of our local residents.”
Helen, Director and Co-Founder of Wolves Play Café, a Community Interest Company supporting young children and their caregivers in the city through play said, “Wolves in the Woods has been a great project and we’re so happy that by working with Gatis and thanks to funding from Millennium Point Trust we’ve been able to help to develop this important space.”