Warm Hubs in village halls
01/22/2023
Village Halls Week is a national campaign run by ACRE (Action with Communities in Rural England), celebrating the important contribution of England’s 10,000+ village halls. This year focuses on how village halls can provide warm, welcoming and inclusive spaces. We spoke to Christine Nicholls, organisational lead in energy equality at Community Action Northumberland (CAN). She told us about their award-winning Warm Hubs project which has been running since 2015.
A rural network of Warm Hubs
Northumberland is one of the most sparsely populated counties in England. According to CAN, it has just 63 people per square kilometre and 40.7% of the population live in rural areas (small towns and fringes, villages, hamlets and isolated dwellings). Village halls and other community buildings provide an important role for local communities.
Christine said: “the cost-of-living-crisis has been dominating the news but the issue of fuel poverty has always been there. Our Warm Hubs project started as a way to address this in rural areas.
The project provides a network of warm, energy-efficient community venues across the county. Hubs are accessible and inclusive and host a programme of events which are needed by the community. Volunteers give energy support and advice.
Now in our eighth year, with the support of Northern Gas Networks, we have 42 Hubs. We’ve won awards and have been highlighted as good practice by Ofgem and the Prince’s Countryside Fund.
Different to a warm space
Warm spaces are run across the country as a temporary solution over cold months. Our project helps to make permanent changes to buildings and the way they are used by their community.
As a first step, we work with the village halls and parish halls to make their buildings energy efficient. An energy audit identifies how the building should be changed to improve its efficiency. This might include photo-voltaic panels, battery storage, insulation or draught proofing. We help the halls to find funding to cover the recommended improvements.
The building is also assessed for accessibility. Some will need ramps and handrails, others may only need small changes such as the temperature of hot water taps being reduced to make them dementia friendly.
We help committees review and update their policies. We also help them make sure their insurance covers their new activities and infrastructure.
Volunteers are given free training. They get trained in first aid, food safety, and health and safety. Warm Hubs are dementia friendly and fully accessible places so they are also given training around this. A designated person within each Warm Hub takes on responsibility for safeguarding including policies, reporting and training. They share our basic safeguarding information video with volunteers but the ‘Safeguarding Officer’ does certified training and assessment.
Community Energy Agent volunteers offer support to local people who want to make changes to the energy-efficiency of their own properties. We help them to develop their knowledge and skills.
Warm Hubs have their own regular programme of events – from coffee mornings and lunch clubs to parent groups and cinema evenings. The programmes are tailor-made to cover what the communities need. Many work with partners and invite them to deliver their services and advice centres from the halls.
Hub of a community
When setting up a new Hub, we look for gaps in provision. We have a waiting list of halls waiting to join.
Pre-pandemic we had a network of 30 Warm Hubs which were used by 19,600 people each year. When the pandemic hit, it meant that there was a strong network of volunteers who were able to get out supporting their communities. They delivered hundreds of meals, shopping trips and dog walks.
Now, as the world shifts again, it is a slow process to get people out of their houses, meeting people. We’re seeing new activities bringing people into Hubs, like community herb gardens, cooking classes for children and one project which was giving away slow cookers.
Every Hub is different. The Warm Hub on Holy Island is at Crossman Hall. The island gets cut off from the mainland by the tide twice a day. This meant that the 300 people who live there wouldn’t be able to rely on a regular support service delivered by someone off-island. So they built a cinema room so they could use video conferencing. There isn’t a shop on the island so we bought the Hub a fridge-freezer and a microwave and hundreds of meals were cooked which could be heated up and shared. The important thing is continuity of a service.
Helping communities with a light touch
The Warm Hubs project has been designed so that we could walk away and everything would continue. We offer a light touch support. The Hubs have regular meetings where they learn from and support each other. They get a regular newsletter and they can chat at any time via the private forum on our website. The network is like a big family.
The project continues to flourish. Everything is run by the community for the community. It’s not about targeting vulnerable people, we don’t use those words. Hubs are for everyone. We talk about energy equality. It’s about promoting friendship and community. About bringing people together.
If you want people to come, if you want them to feel a change in their lives, it has to be relevant to them. It has to be a long-term, continuous and sustainable solution. The buildings need to be reliable and warm.
Sharing the model
During the last few months, we’ve have been contacted by village halls, councils and charities who want to set up their own Warm Hubs. To help, we have built the Warm Hubs toolkit which we launched during Village Halls Week.
The toolkit describes how to set up a Warm Hub scheme. It includes guidance to work through to follow the Warm Hub principles. It is free for any organisation with a building open to the public and comes with support from a dedicated Warm Hubs Co-ordinator who can help guide organisations through the process.
"Warm Hubs are warm, safe places where you can expect an inclusive and friendly welcome. We’d love to see more of them across the country.”
See also
- Ways to make your village hall more eco-friendly inside and outside your building.
- Going green in the north east – a project by VONNE project aiming to inspire and motivate voluntary sector organisations in the north east to make positive changes.
