A vital community centre in one of the country’s most deprived areas is set to close due to funding cuts, Islington Now has learned.
Staff at the Andover Community Centre (ACC), which has served residents of the Andover, Six Acres and Haden and Clifton estates for more than 15 years, have been given a month’s pay and told to find new jobs.
Community groups regularly using the centre, including a children’s crèche and a Somali welfare centre, face eviction when funding runs out on 19 March.
Alison McCullock, crèche coordinator at Bright Start Children’s Crèche said, “We only found out about the closure on Monday but it has huge implications for us. If the council shuts the centre then we will have to close.
“Nowhere else to go”
“I don’t understand why they would spend all this money on the centre and the estate just to close it down. The children and families that use our services will have nowhere else to go.”
Ibrahim Moussa has run a Somali Welfare Centre from the ACC since 2003. The group that provides advice on education, welfare, benefits and housing to Somali immigrants. He said, “This is so sad. They are effectively making us homeless.
“I’m struggling to explain the funding issues to the people we help because many of them are struggling to learn English – but they are trying, and they want to build lives here. Bad things like this always seem to happen because of money.”
“Time to fight”
Barbara Sidnell, Labour councillor for Finsbury Park Ward said: “The Council has been well aware that our funding runs out this month and they just don’t seem to care.
“This is one of the most deprived wards in the country, never mind the borough, and the Andover Centre performs a vital role here.
The centre manager Theresa Coyle has just received an MBE for voluntary service to the community in Islington. That’s a testament to the kind of work being carried out.” “We’ve accepted the Council offer of a month’s wage, but only because it gives us time to fight this.”
Petition
The centre staff set up a petition opposing the closure after they narrowly lost out on a lottery grant earlier last month, which attracted more than a hundred signatures.
Cllr Barbara Smith, Islington Council’s executive member for housing, said: “The council is working with the Andover Community Centre to help it overcome the end of lottery funding.
“We are helping the centre’s management board to plan for the future and we have made emergency funding available to keep services running for residents.”
Meanwhile, Felicity Thorpe-Tracey, 33, who takes her two daughters to the mother and baby group at the centre said she would be sad to see it close down.
“I have only been using this place for a couple of months but already love it,” she said. “The staff here are always on the ball and attentive. “It’s so infuriating that these small local institutions are under attack, the people who are suffering are the people who really need these services the most.”
Let down
Sue Burbidge, pictured above, is an administrator at the Andover Community Centre and her brother, Robert, right, is a director of the Tollington Community Association. They both feel closing the centre down would be a disaster for people in the local community, many of whom rely on the centre’s services.
Sue said: “It’s disgusting. We work so hard with the community on a variety of projects. How can they think of closing us? It would be such a pity, not just for the staff, but the elderly, disabled, young, who all use the centre.
“We offer so many services that people value. We do a crèche, a stay and play, we have a kitchen that people can use and we often give people a meal. All the community groups use us – Turkish, Indian, Somali. The Somalis really need us, to meet and socialise with each other, especially as most them don’t speak English. They come for advice. “It would be such a shame if these people had nowhere to go.”
Image credit – Tom Brooks-Pollock
