During the summer the Timebuilders Community café has been ran outside in Ferham Park as ‘Picnic in the Park’.
This was to further engage families and young people who would not necessarily come into a church through either personal or physical barriers.
Rotherham Federation community organiser Vicky Hilton, Christine Batchford from Timebuilders and volunteers promoted the 6 week programme through door knocking, attending local events and speaking with local partners. Whilst running an assembly at Ferham School. We discussed the idea with young people and created an immersive learning environment in which young people helped us set up a picnic within their school hall. We then arranged a couple of sessions talking to and promoting the activities to the families collecting their children on the school gate.
100s of local families were engaged with and invited along to the picnic. Mascots— minion and Marshal from Paw Patrol—helped to attract a lot of attention!
Staff, volunteers and local people provided a delicious range of homemade food from fresh salad to rice dishes, which were very popular with families. The sessions gave local people the opportunity to socialise and make new friendships with other local people attending the picnic, with plenty of activities for the children to do including parachute games, rounder’s, cricket and a scavenger hunt ran by Places for People.
The summer picnics have now come to an end but the events have been incredible for local life and community cohesion. Over the 6 weeks hundreds of individuals and families have attended the picnic and Christine from Timebuilders has done an incredible job alongside the volunteers and local community members to make it work. Without the team all working together the project would have been much harder.
We now hope that this will encourage more families to further engage with activities at the Church including the community café which will now take place in the Church again every Monday evening.
This was taken from our Autumn ‘Connect’ newsletter. Click here to read the newsletter.