The Hope Hub is a community space in Winton that provides affordable meals, hot beverages, and refreshments. Run by volunteers, the Hub supports people experiencing debt, food poverty, homelessness and addiction.
Winton’s Hope Hub is a comfortable and relaxing environment where people feel safe and warm. Through its friendly welcome, the organisation builds trust and confidence to help people access support that makes a difference. Talbot Village Trust has helped to support the Hub’s expansion and realise its ambitions to grow.
Fiona Hirons, Volunteer, explains: “Hope Hub is a non-religious element of Hope Community Church in Winton. We’ve been in the community for a very long time, but about seven years ago, we looked at how we could go deeper by considering what’s being done elsewhere and the needs in our immediate vicinity.
“One of the ways we felt we could help was through low-cost food and drinks, with the comfort of an upmarket café. It was the first step to building a trusted community and a strong pool of volunteers, with other activities growing from there. Volunteers come from a wide range of backgrounds, including asylum seekers, those in recovery from addiction, ex-offenders and people living with mental health problems. For many, the Hub provides a vital resource to gain work experience, confidence, and a CV for future employment. Sometimes it’s about confidence building: we’ve had volunteers with all sorts of limitations who want to give back, and we take the view that everyone should have opportunity to shine. We create bespoke roles that suit everyone – however much time and ability they’re able to offer.
“For those we help, it means a lot! Through volunteering with us and helping others, people gain something – if we’re not a long-term fit, it doesn’t matter, it’s just lovely to see people leave us with a difference – people get something very positive out of being here. We meet with and listen to people who live locally, which informs what we can do to help. That’s led us to things like the monthly community meal for seniors and safe space craft activities for people who’re feeling lonely or isolated.”
After the COVID-19 pandemic, the Hub found that many affordable activities and services being run locally didn’t reopen – more often, they found that social services were bringing clients to the Café to get them back out into the community. During school holidays, the Hub helps to provide free school meals (including parents), ensuring that children are still able to access good food, with activities for pre-school children too.
Fiona says: “It’s a constant learning curve and we’re constantly looking for new resources, whether that’s finance, food and supplies, volunteers or referral partners. It’s a huge range of things that affect people today and we’re battling with less volunteers and less funding, yet we’re doing more than we’ve ever done before.
“In 2022, we were the second place in Bournemouth to become a warm space and I think we’re going to see this service in even greater demand over this Winter. Last year, we were able to offer instant snacks – things like Pot Noodles and soup, but thankfully this year we’ve got better provision to offer people a hot meal and drink in the café.”
Hope Hub works closely with other voluntary organisations across Winton to ensure their services run over complementary days, and as a result, local people can access food support seven days a week.
“Between Bournemouth Community Church, the Salvation Army and ourselves, we cross-refer to each other and share supplies. We all do different things, for example Salvation Army offers haircuts, and Hope Hub can use a form of Christian crowd funding to raise a cash sum for a specific need, so if someone needs something specific, we can try to help.
For Hope Hub, there’s benefit to being a small setup, operation and space, and the organisation is keen to retain its friendly and individual approach where visitors feel welcomed and unique. However, plans are in the works to unlock a new area of the building to offer even more provision in future.
“Our next project centres on renovating another room we have available at the Hub – it needs improving to help us upscale our community meals. We’re currently only open each Tuesday and Wednesday, but we’d love to recruit more volunteers and be able to offer expanded opening times.
“We’d also love to expand our work to do more to help Home Education and Special Educational Need (SEN) groups, dementia services and services that support people living with Autism.”
We get to know people and we build up trust, because we know that people won’t be honest about the support they need until they feel comfortable. After that, we can talk to them about how we can help.
