NEW CHURCH HALL

Progress made since the last Newsletter

• Balance of Buiding Project Account at the end of November amoounted to £37,975 - having just paid a bill of £8,808 to the architect (£17,862 is also held in trust by BU from the land sale)
• Meetings have been held with all organisations
• we are still waiting for news on funding for the business plan
• Presentations have been made to the Church and Friendly Circle
• David Milliband, our MP, accepted an invitation to meet with organisational leaders at the Church on 2^nd December
• Many thanks to all thise who volunteered to carry out various tasks for the above event.
• Doug Harvey has completed taking photosof all activities for a display
• Katie White has put together all the display material
• Joan Taylor has organised the Coffee Morning
• Dawn Martin has taken on a fund raising idea of selling t-shirts badged with the Building fund Project Logo

Construction Programme/Costs

• Do you remember the question I asked in the last Newsletter? It was - How close do you think we are to laying the first brick?
• Well I believe we could aim to start the new hall in a little over a year's time.
• The architect has updated his costs for the hall, including probable increases due to inflation based on starting work early in 2007.
• Total costs would be £437,000 which is significantly greater than the last estimate.
• However, it may be possible to start work if we can raiseanother £115, 000.
• this amount of money, along wiyh that we have already raised, would be sufficient to build the foundations, walls, roof and doors/windows.

What do we need to do now

• We need more people to take on an idea to raise funds
• We need more ideas(an ideas board will soon be set up permanently in the hall for anyone to add to)
• We will need volunteers who have good telephone skills to help with initial aontacts with external funders

Ian Taylor