St Neots Town Council has pledged to support Love’s Farm House to the tune of £55,000. The money will be critical in helping us turn an empty building into a fully fledged community centre. £45,000 goes towards fixtures and fittings, including furniture, kitchen, office and IT equipment. The money will also be used to upgrade certain elements of the building’s specification, such as improving the quality of the flooring and installing additional power sockets and light fittings.

There’s a further £10,000 for our pre-launch costs, including professional fees, licenses, deposits and starting inventory. The Council has also offered to contribute towards marketing and our launch festival, and to provide manpower for garden landscaping.

It’s a tremendous show of support, and one that we feel reflects the Town Council’s commitment to supporting our community centre and Love’s Farm in general. We still have some further fundraising to do, but this generous funding means we can now be confident that we’ll be ready to take on the management of the building when construction is complete. We’d like to say a huge thank you to all the councillors and staff at St Neots Town Council for their support.

Meanwhile, we have signed an agreement to lease with Huntingdonshire District Council, which ties both parties into entering into a 30-year lease once the building is complete. There’s no going back now!

Helene, Judith and Ben from the Love’s Farm House volunteers team went to Cambourne this morning to meet the managers of 19 – The Coffee House. It’s located in the foyer of Cambourne Church and is run entirely by volunteers. It’s been in operation for four years and is now open six mornings a week serving tea, coffee, snacks and lunches.

It was great to meet the managers Jacqui and Gerald, and see them making such a great success of the venture. The coffee shop is well used on a daily basis, and is clearly a valuable community resource for the residents of Cambourne. It was really useful hearing about the successes and pitfalls they’ve encountered, and to have a look around their kitchen.

A couple of weeks ago we visited another volunteer-run coffee shop. Pippins is based at the community room in Hardwick Primary School on the first Saturday of the month. Its manager Anne Jones clearly runs a tight ship with her team of cake bakers, serving staff, washer uppers and other helpers. In a separate meeting she provided us with lots of useful information, particularly regarding setting up a coffee shop from scratch and working with teams of volunteers.

The common thread to both places is a sense that they’re there to serve the community first and foremost. That’s partly through high quality food and drink at reasonable prices, but also with friendly service and a sense of comradeship that comes from working as a team of volunteers. It’s still early days for Love’s Farm House, and a decision is yet to be made as to how we will use our kitchen and café facilities, but 19 and Pippins are interesting case studies for how we could make it work.