Friends of Stretford Public Hall

Friends of Stretford Public Hall is one of ten community businesses funded by the Power To Change Makers & Maintainers programme, which supports community businesses who are already on a journey of creating community tech – technology that can meet their specific needs, respects their autonomy and creates value that sticks to places.

Friends of Stretford Public Hall began life in 2014 as a volunteer-led campaign to save Stretford Public Hall in Trafford, Greater Manchester, which was under threat of closure.

Now established as a charitable community benefit society, the organisation exists to make Stretford Public Hall an accessible space to meet the needs of the local community.  

Friends of Stretford Public Hall aims to improve the lives of local residents by providing opportunities for employment, access to arts, local heritage & support services, as well as to enhance opportunities for regeneration through preservation of the Grade-II listed Victorian building.

Friends of Stretford Public Hall is principally accountable to the local community of Stretford, as well as their 800-plus investor-members, who own the Hall and have a direct say in how it is run on a one-member, one-vote basis.

How the Friends of Stretford Hall are creating and using community tech

Friends of Stretford Public Hall developed their community tech in 2021 to help them manage over 800 hundred members with their respective community share investments, totalling over £250,000.

The team was aware of the lack of dedicated online tools to help societies manage their registry, and their starting point has been to try and capitalise on the existing cloud-based database systems already being used extensively for similar purposes by SMEs, charities and other non-profits. Working with a group of practitioners, this led them to create AirRegister, a dedicated online share register tool for community organisations managing community share offers.

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Friends of Stretford Public Hall’s open and free share register tool is hosted as a template on the popular cloud platform, Airtable – and with support from Co-operatives UK, is available for free to any society that wishes to use it. AirRegister has now been accessed by over 50 societies.

Investor-members are benefiting from the value it generates, by improving the team’s communication with their members and ensuring that the community's financial stake in the organisation is being handled effectively.

Friends of Stretford Public Hall will use funding from the Makers & Maintainers programme to expand AirRegister from a template built on Airtable, and establish a standalone open-source application that is not subject to 'vendor lock in’.

They are aware that like many other no-code tools, it is locked in to the Airtable ecosystem – a large US tech company  - which may not align to the values and principles some within the co-operative and community sector, and also presents risks in terms of the future sustainability of AirRegister as it is subject to Airtable's pricing and technology strategy.

Furthermore, the funding will mean the Friends of Stretford Public Hall can work with aligned developers to make AirRegister more customised for both their needs and that of other societies.

How community tech is strengthening local communities

AirRegister allows the Friends of Stretford Hall to more effectively manage key share register information, from member details, share offer terms and conditions and investment data. In particular, AirRegister gives the team confidence that they effectively manage the administration and communication pressures that are associated with raising investment via community shares. This will enable them to relaunch their share offer in 2023 to raise additional funds for the organisation, and implement energy efficiency measures to reduce their environmental impact.

In turn, the technology is giving the local community more confidence in investing in place-based ventures like Stretford Public Hall, knowing that their contributions are responsible and effectively managed.

The community impact of this is clear: over the past five years, Friends of Stretford Public Hall has provided venue hire for over 160 different organisations that have used the hall for their activities; established a co-working space for freelance creatives and artists’ studios, providing workspace for 76 local businesses and freelancers over the past four years; raised over £1 million through grant and investment funding, to support the reopening and restoration of the Hall; and launched a range of weekly health and wellbeing activities, regularly delivering services to approximately 250 people each week.

Since March 2020, they have been operating Stretford Community Hub, providing support to the residents of Stretford. They have worked closely with local partners, including Trafford Council, local NHS services and Trafford Housing Trust, and have delivered a range of services including support with food shopping, prescription collections, wellbeing calls, and information services. Friends of Stretford Public Hall supports up to 100 residents each month through the hub, and have distributed emergency financial support to over 150 residents so far this year.

Friends of Stretford Public Hall has proved that community tech gives confidence to the local community, in turn supporting social cohesion, community wellbeing and economic regeneration for the benefit of all who live and work there.

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