A chilly wind was whipping through Lawrence Weston on the north-western fringes of Bristol but Donna Sealey and her fellow workers were braving the bitter weather to renovate raised beds in front of the shopping parade.
“Next summer these will be full of herbs – sage, rosemary, marjoram, whatever people tell us they’d like,” said Sealey, a community development worker at the charity Ambition Lawrence Weston (ALW). “We’re also planting fruit and nut trees and we’ve just started work on a community allotment.
“Many people in Lawrence Weston are living in flats with no gardens. We’re going to grow produce on our green spaces and residents will be able to take what they need and we’ll use some for cooking classes and community meals.”
The raised beds are just one modest example of what the charity is about – helping people in one of the most deprived areas of Bristol by creating ways for the community to help itself, especially in these times of crisis.
ALW has other, much grander schemes, including building what it says will be England’s largest onshore wind turbine five miles away on the banks of the River Severn. Diggers and a crane are readying the ground for the turbine, which will feed in power to the National Grid from next year.
The blades should be turning by the spring and the money earned – estimated at £100,000 annually to begin with – is likely to be used to help local people through the cost of living crisis by assisting them with power bills or retrofitting homes with energy saving measures.
In February construction is due to begin on 38 social rent and shared ownership homes with designs shaped by the estate’s residents and work is also about to start on a new ALW community hub.
Right now ALW is helping the most in need get through the winter by handing out emergency packs of slow cookers, hot water bottles and LED lights and opening up its centre for people to charge phones and get warm over a cup of tea.
Donations to this year’s Guardian and Observer annual charity appeal will go – through our two partners, Locality and Citizens Advice – to scores of local charities and community projects like ALW, which are working at the frontline of the cost of living crisis in some of the UK’s most deprived neighbourhoods.
Great-grandmother Jacki Crouch, who used to work in the post office, had just picked up her emergency pack from ALW. She said it had been a “godsend” over the years, from helping sort out damp in her home to providing a Christmas meal during the pandemic. The young members of her family have enjoyed trips the seaside thanks to ALW. “They do so much for so many people,” she said.
At ALW’s headquarters, Norman Laity, 78, described how another of the charity’s groups, Men in Sheds, was helping people learn new skills – and combat isolation. Laity makes beautiful pens. In the spring and summer the group decorates flower pots and refurbishes garden furniture. “We get all sorts of people here, from ages 25 to 80. It’s a great way of getting people out of their houses and spending time together,” he said.
Even before this winter’s crisis bit, 6% of people in the Avonmouth and Lawrence Weston ward were using food banks compared with just under 2% across the city. Almost 17% were finding it difficult to manage financially, against 9% for the whole of Bristol, and 17% of children were “in need”.
Mark Pepper, the development manager at ALW and a former social and youth worker in the area, said that the situation was the worst it had been. “Before the crisis hit us, people were scrimping and saving, so God knows what it’s going to be like now. Demand has gone through the roof.”
Pepper said the charity’s success was based on approaching big schemes such as the wind turbine in a commercial, professional way, creating a separate entity to ALW – Ambition Community Energy – which is run by volunteers but with two paid project managers.
If a big company like Amazon wanted to put up a wind turbine, they’d bring in the expertise to do that. In the past communities have been expected to learn how to do that. We haven’t got time for that.”
ALW has had to fill in a lot of gaps. There is no council-run library in the neighbourhood, so ALW runs a book exchange; no local authority youth club, so the ALW centre hosts clubs and activities. ALW campaigned for the busy new Lidl in Lawrence Weston, even hiring a retail consultant to make sure a big name saw the value of moving in.
Of course, Pepper said, the government should be doing more. “Food banks shouldn’t be here. We shouldn’t have to be giving out hot water bottles to old people just to keep them warm. It’s disgusting, really, given the amount of wealth we’ve got in this country. But that’s where we are at the moment and we’ll keep on doing what we can.”
Donations to the Guardian and Observer charity appeal can be made online by credit card, debit card or PayPal, or by phone on 0151 284 1126. We are unable to accept cheques.
