Hey folks. We’ve been pretty quiet lately, so here’s an update from us!
Over the past six months we’ve been building relationships with solicitors who have been consulting and helping us with our application for CLG status – this is essential for us to move forward in the way we’ve mapped out as an organisation. Our paperwork for this was sent off two weeks ago, and so we hope to have this sorted soon – it’s likely we’ll hear back on this within the next fortnight. Following this, we are working on our application to apply for CIO status – for this, we’ll need our business plan finalised which we’re also doing with the help of pro-bono solicitors.
Once we’ve heard back from our CLG application, we hope to meet with City Hall and the Mayor’s team again to see how they can support us.
Although many of our volunteers are experts in their fields, some of the work we’re doing involves some of our volunteers learning about entirely new areas of project planning, business plan developing and specialisms, so we’ve spent a great deal of time working on this and in partnership with professionals who are generously helping to guide our work.
Over the past year, we’ve been working with Flamingo, a strategic insight agency, on some bespoke research to demonstrate the need for the Centre in London. We’ve also been prioritising our Community Outreach work, which will be essential for ensuring that we’re a space which works for the groups and charities that already exist to use – and to make sure we’re not duplicating any services.
It might seem that the work is slow, but our small team of volunteers work every day around their full-time jobs to bring the Centre to life. It’s only been a little over a year since we kicked the project off, so we hope you can bear with us!
All the money that was donated as part of our crowdfunder and fundraising events is still in our community bank account.
The only expenses we’ve accrued so far are minor, for costs of artists and performers at our events, BSL interpreters at our meetings and monthly maintenance costs for things like our website and domain.
We’re currently working new content for our website which will include an FAQ page, so please hold tight for that! If you’re interested in keeping up to date, make sure you sign up to receive our newsletter and download past issues of newsletters at the button below.
As always, we welcome any volunteers with skills to help us on our way to get involved and lend their time and expertise.
In solidarity,
LLGBTQCC volunteers