Gym floor appeal update

We can’t believe the amazing response we’ve had from you all to our appeal for help with the gym room floor! Everyone has rallied round in so many ways.

Reducing the price

Andy Cudworth, a centre user, came forward to offer his services as Andy Cudworth Architecture and advised us about how the job could be done better for a better price. He is organising the job for us with the help of Geoff Elliot Property Renovation and Building, reducing the cost to less than £5000! Huge thanks to Andy for all his time and effort!

Bridge End Builders and Michael Cooper have very kindly offered to come and help us on site.

Donations

We are very grateful for donations from Lucy Scarff, Emma Stevenson, Jolene Allen, Zoe Wyatt, Amanda Greenhough, Mark Beevers (#PROPIG), Christine Pointon, Mozzienet, Caroline Jubb, Carol Hawksworth, Liz Hutchison, Barbara Lintin, Alan Laslett, Margaret Crossland, Sarah Campbell, Joanne Griffin, Warren Mitchell, Ian Billingham, Heather Simpson, Graham Pears and several anonymous donors making an amazing £3,902!

…so we can get the job started!

After the reduced price and all the donations, we have about £1000 left to find. We’ve decided that rather than hold the job up, we’ll borrow from our refurbishment money (more about that later!) and fill the gap after Christmas with more fundraising and applying for some funding. We think the work on the dry rot might start as early as w/c 4th December!

Fundraising

That’s where we’ve had loads of great ideas from everyone – and we’ve decided we are going to combine lots of them into a fundraising fun day. We thought about a Christmas one first, but it’s a busy time of year, so we have picked 17th February. We’ve had suggestions for an auction of promises, raffle, jumble sale, guess the name of the bear, tombola, cakes and drinks. Thanks to Marina Wood, Nadine Geldard, Andy Todd, Faye Maxwell-Keys and Sharon Chan for these ideas. We’ll be letting you know more details after Christmas.

Funding

We’ve also had lots of very useful funding advice and suggestions from Jonathan Rickerby, Ian Brisland, Adam Richardson, Sarah Catterall, Louise McInnes, Nadine Geldard, Amy Palmer, Susan Beaumont, Michelle Darlow, Karen Senior and Jane Archer-Haynes. Thanks to all of them!

One last thing to help us now…

Something you could do to help us out (a suggestion from Amanda Greenhough) is to go to our Easy Fundraising page.  It’s very easy to use, you just go to the site and join then find the online shop you want to use. Then you buy as usual, it doesn’t cost you any more. But we get a small percentage. We could raise a lot through this if people were willing to buy Christmas presents through Easy Fundraising – https://www.easyfundraising.org.uk/causes/sportingpenistone/ Places like Amazon, Argos, Toys R Us, Smyths, Early Learning – all the big stores are on there. Thanks!

And to everyone…

Thanks for all the other advice and messages of support as well. It’s great to know so many people value Penistone Leisure Centre and want to see us continue!