The Trinity Centre’s 100 Beacons research paper published last week aims to shine a light on what it claims is a disparity in council funding between community buildings and city centre flagship projects like the Bristol Beacon.
Trinity CEO Emma Harvey, who has been working in the community arts Grade II listed building for 15 years, is concerned about the impact of the budget on local communities and thinks the council needs to reassess the way they allocate funding.
Due to austerity measures taken by the government over the last 10 years, Bristol City Council has been involved in what is known as 'community asset transfers' as a way of reducing costs, while maintaining community buildings.
This means that many council-owned buildings are being run by charities and community groups.
Bristol City Council say that any organisation that operates a building it owns is free to bid for any funding it is eligible to apply for.
Many of these groups use the buildings for free but are also responsible for maintaining them and need to apply for their own funding as under the asset transfer agreements.
Henbury Community Centre is one such building. Wendy Baverstock runs the centre as a volunteer manager and said that it "hasn’t been touched" for 30 years.
Wendy, who participated in the Trinity report, believes that if for any reason she was no longer able to continue as a full time volunteer, the centre would close overnight.
Although they are grateful for the £20,000 they received in council funding due to the role the centre played as a Covid hub, she believes that they would be in a much more stable position if they were to receive more regular funding of that nature.
Wendy feels like the community has now been "completely forgotten about" and said it would be nice to see some community development workers or have additional support for the new youth group they plan to set up at the end of the month.
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Wendy said: “We saved the council thousands and thousands in this place and if they took it back off us tomorrow, it would be all together, they could just move someone straight in and not have to spend any money.
“The reason I haven’t been paid up until now is because of the amount of maintenance.
“We have just got a really good chef for the community café but we need to get him employed before we lose him,” added Wendy.
For Emma, one of the key problems with funding decisions is that those who already have more, get more.
She said: “The more successful you become, the more someone will want to invest in you and the more investment you have, the more ambitious you become in your projects.
“I love the Beacon and what they do, I love the team that work there but it’s not about them, it’s about the process.
“Is it really the right way to invest in a city to be continually ploughing multi-million pound investments into a city centre where post Covid, are people even going to be using the city centre in the same way that they were?”
'We don’t want to be the last building standing'
As a larger community asset, the Trinity Centre can afford to pay for staff to carry out fundraising but Emma fears their success is seen as a model to be duplicated rather than a matter of good luck and determination.
With over 200 different community groups using the space in any given year, Emma feels uncomfortable in the knowledge that as a big organisation they will attract funding while other neglected community buildings end up as flats or get taken over by a private company.
“We’ve managed to make an old building viable in spite of it coming to us in a state [of disrepair] but that’s not a sustainable model," she added.
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“Relying on somebody like me to be determined enough to make something work instead of having it in the city plan that this community deserves infrastructure is the wrong way round.
“We’re relying on individuals to make things work in spite of the circumstances that they find themselves in when they take on a building that isn’t fit for public use.
“You can’t point to Trinity as a success story and say well all the other buildings just need to do that, we made it work but there could have been so many times where it didn’t work.
“A lot of it’s been down to chance and luck as much as anything else because we’ve managed to be in the right place at the right time.
“It’s almost like a snowball effect, you get one bit of funding and that leads to another.
“Over the year we work with over 200 community partners, often you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.
“I’ve seen it happen so many times where you’ll be in a neighbourhood and people will be asking, ‘what happened to that youth group?’ and then someone will reply, ‘they couldn’t afford to keep running the building so they stopped it.
“We work with these other buildings as well and they’re all very important in shaping our neighbourhood and shaping what Bristol looks like.”
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Bristol City Council has confirmed that council funding given to the Bristol Beacon is set at £55.5 million.
A Bristol City Council spokesperson said: "Any organisation that operates a building owned by the council is free to bid for any funding it is eligible to apply for.
"Any building that requires maintenance that the council is responsible for will wither have funds allocated through the property teams budget or will be on a maintenance list waiting for funds to be allocated.
"This will be completely on a case by case basis based on the terms of the lease."
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