Cooking on a fat-free budget

back to the contents page

St Sidwell’s is a model innovative healthy living centre. But that doesn’t mean its path to fruition has been smooth. Alex Klaushofer reports

Make sure you receive your fair share of lottery cash - take out a no-obligation trial subscription today.

St Sidwell’s Centre in Exeter is the first project in the UK to have won awards from all three of the New Opportunities Fund’s programme areas.

NOF has awarded the project a grant of almost £500, 000 for its healthy living centre, while £50,000 from its education pot funds an IT centre. And in October the centre won an environmental grant of £6,667 for the creation – with the British Trust of Conservation Volunteers – of a community garden. To achieve this success, St Sidwell’s demonstrably meets NOF’s key criteria of working with partnerships, involving the community and focusing on outcomes. The project involves the city council, health authority, primary care trust and further education college, as well as local churches and community and voluntary organisations. Despite its location in the heart of one of Britain’s most affluent cities, the centre serves a deprived area: Rougemont is in the top 15% of deprived wards, according to the DTLR index for England. Making a difference to this kind of community means offering a diverse range of services. The 700 people who come through the cen-tre’s doors each week might be taking a computer course, bringing toddlers to the sleep clinic, attending a T’ai chi class, or simply using the centre’s café.

St Sidwell’s coordinator, Tony Badcock, stresses that plans for the cen-tre were long in the making. ‘These kinds of projects don’t happen overnight, just because there’s a pot of funding,’ he says. The genesis of the project goes back to the mid 1990s, when the group of organ-isations making up its partners today began identifying local needs. With a population high in single parents and isolated elderly people, lacking in affordable accommodation, a GP, or any kind of community facility, the most pressing demand from the community was, says Badcock, for ‘a meeting place’.

Consequently the healthy living cen-tre was conceived, Badcock acknowledges, ‘as a community project’.

They already had the building, since the Church of England had donated an under-used parish church. With the top part converted into 18 flats for those in housing need, with grants from the Housing Corporation and the city council, the lower part of the building needed refurbishing.

The project hit trouble at that point, because the new SW Regional Development Agency refused to honour a £50,000 capital commitment it had inherited from the Countryside Agency, to do the necessary refurbishment. And the cost was in any case fast rising, to twice that sum.

The RDA only conceded and paid up six months later, after St Sidwell’s had applied pressure via the local MP and regional chamber. Badcock says the RDA’s procedures weren’t set up for such a small project. ‘They found it very difficult to comprehend. Their systems are appalling. I do think that organisations like the RDA can learn a lot from NOF.’ Badcock has good reason to say so. For it was NOF that stepped in and agreed to loan them £50,000 so the project could continue. The distributor made the loan against its own revenue grant (approx £100,000 a year for five years to cover salaries and running costs), which means that by 2005 St Sidwell’s will have to have raised the £46,000 in repayment.

The centre finally opened, six months late, in January 2001. ‘NOF have been extremely flexible and very supportive,’ says Badcock. ‘Without that we wouldn’t have been able to open.’ The hub of the centre is the café, acting as a draw for people who then go on to use other facilities. With a training kitchen offering courses in ‘cooking on a budget’ and ‘fat-free meals’, it also contributes to the centre’s health promotion work. But as a commercial café in the city centre, it raised a problem: many of its customers would be affluent people coming from outside the centre’s catchment area, potentially breaking the terms of NOF’s grant.

To get round this, St Sidwell’s introduced a community membership scheme, giving locals a 30% discount on food while retaining the opportunity to maximise income from other visitors. ‘This ensures the NOF grant is targeted at people in need. If we didn’t have that kind of system our services could be used by anybody,’ says Badcock.

The café will make the centre £40,000 this year, money that will become increasingly important for the project’s long term sustainability. Even with the three NOF grants and funding from other organisations such as the Church Urban Fund and the primary care trust, the centre still needs to raise another £10,000 from charities this year. When the non-renewable NOF funding runs out in 2005, the centre will need to find £100,000 from other sources each year. Badcock is optimistic. ‘Success breeds success,’ he points out. ‘It’s a lot easier to get funding once you’re already funded and been proven successful.’ But he stresses the need to keep developing new ways of finding money, adding that a key message is ‘not being overly reliant on one source of funding.’ St Sidwell’s is a typical healthy living centre in its broad – some might say unorthodox – approach to healthcare. The centre does not provide access to a GP and, apart from health visitors offering support for giving up smoking and losing weight, much of its provision falls under the banner of complementary medicine. Peter Grant, NOF’s director of operations, says there had been concern about the effectiveness of alternative therapies, but adds: ‘if that’s what local people have said they want, we’re prepared to step in and fund it.’ This view echoes the conviction, at the level of government public health policy, that reducing health inequalities involves tackling a complex range of factors – social and economic as well as clinical – that play into people’s lifestyles. It also represents a shift in lottery funding away from output-related targets to those more concerned with social impact.

Grant says: ‘It’s not just that it’s a health project; we think the project itself will lead to certain changes in the area.’ Badcock shares this perspective. He points, for example, to the fact that three centre users are now in teacher training. ‘Our success is not about the number of people. It’s about which people are coming in, and what they do when they are here.’

For more information contact tony.bad-cock@talk21.com