Ema Wilkes is the chief executive of Neo Community, which runs a café, supermarket, youth club, wellbeing sessions, and art room in Birkenhead, on the Wirral Peninsula.
“We now have a very successful community-run house in Rock Ferry that is five old properties knocked together, a community garden, a community cafe, kids club, all sorts, and it’s all pay-as -you-feel. So it’s time skills or money that pays for our centre.
“There is a food security problem in our area anyway, but different for once, we went straight to our local authority with a plan, and said, “This is what we’re going to do, shall we do it together?” And they recognised that they have resources, but we have the local intelligence, we know the friends and neighbours, before they ring the council. So over the last eight weeks we have done 17,000 hampers supporting 708 individuals, we have taken over our local sports centre and we have 1000 cooked meals a day all done by community members.
“We are about trading, we took over a bistro so we have a really big kitchen ready and waiting, we have chefs and volunteers, sometimes too many volunteers, and a good rota system, so we’re keeping people engaged and looking forwards, a real community led response.
We’ve started surveying too, we have 12 different organisations plus the council working together. We’re already looking for our long term plan, making sure our partnership is really solid.
That’s what we can learn from one another on these calls – how do we move past the present moment to keep people that have stepped up involved.”