Hub of activity opens its doors in Stalybridge

TEAMS from different agencies and organisations are getting together under one roof after the new Stalybridge Community Hub was launched.

An empty building on Grosvenor Street will now be the nerve centre for schemes, programs and charities around the town.

Active Tameside took over the running but staff from Tameside Council, Greater Manchester Police, Barty’s Food Bank, support groups and even supermarkets’ community champions will all be on hand.

And at the launch, members of the public offered to volunteer their time to help run some of the community projects that will operate from there.

Seeing the doors open to the new facility delighted Tameside Council’s executive member for population health, Cllr Eleanor Wills, who will co-ordinate a lot of the use by community groups.

She told The Correspondent: “We’ve got to start looking at accessing our communities with health, as well as prevention services and support services.

“This is a great asset. A vehicle that enables people to access that support and these services on their doorstep.

“It will be quite organic and uses will unfold as time goes on. At the moment, we very much want it to be an open page in terms of who uses it.

“Some adult day care service users will be using it, right through to some of the youth engagement services, looking at some of the anti-social behaviour we’ve had in Stalybridge and how to engage with younger people.

“A few weeks ago when I was on a litter pick, there was a young woman in a domestically abusive situation who was in Stalybridge as she was running away.

“Had we had something like this open with support services inside, that would’ve been there at that moment of crisis for that individual.

“Unfortunately, it wasn’t. She has been given support but not as quickly as it could’ve been.

“Here we’ll have some of the mental health services in and we’re looking at having neighbourhood hubs like this where people who need additional support can go.

“It will be different people from different services at different times.”

An ‘organic approach’ is being adopted to decide the hub’s opening times – the more it is needed at night, it will open later in the day.

And Cllr Wills added: “It’s a community program with community wholeness. It’s on the strength of that community to make it a workable space – to show we need it all day and all night.

“But it can adapt to what the community needs. It can properly cater to need rather than what we deem the need to be.”