Cherwell Collective is hard at work to launch our WISH Headquarters renovation in Kidlington. The building retrofit will bolster the capabilities of WISH Kidlington as a multifunctional community hub, educational resource, and social facility. When our vision is realized, this fully integrated facility will also provide additional space for building skills and sharing resources to enable a circular economy locally. It will also grow in its capacity as a place for community members to build connections that improve their individual well-being.

In 2022, Cherwell Collective launched Waste Innovation Station Headquarters (WISH) with our pilot project in Kidlington. The WISH pilot saw the opening of our current headquarters location at 4 The Parade, Kidlington.  Originally intended as a community space to help the community reduce waste, the facility has taken on numerous additional duties. It serves as a community gathering space, dining facility, and home to our exhibits on carbon cost, greenhouse gas emissions, and the circular economy. At present, it is delivering well beyond its originally intended capacity.

Rising Facility Costs Drive a Growing Need for Our Own Space

Rapidly rising rents for public facilities, such as Exeter Hall in Kidlington, have forced us to do more events and general operations out of our relatively small WISH Headquarters. Our goal is to continue to serve the communities that have come to rely on our classes, social events, and distributions of food and other resources, just as we have since Cherwell Collective’s founding during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Fortunately, Cherwell Collective has successfully tapped into various grants and sources of funding. We are also actively pursuing additional grants with the hope to fully fund our upcoming renovation plan.  These grants, together with the generous support of individual donations, could enable us to fully fund this project and open new and improved facilities by March 2025.

Inclusivity Is Our Aim As We Retrofit and Expand

The renovations will help turn WISH Headquarters into a comfortable and functional space for a wide array of ongoing events. Two key elements of the renovation to improve functionality and comfort include a new commercial-grade kitchen and all new flooring. The kitchen will allow us to triple our food production capacity on site.  Food production goes to support our Climatarian Kitchen, educational programs around adopting a climatarian diet, and the production of healthy and sustainable children’s meals for youth in summer programs.

Cherwell Collective’s food preparation has previously taken place at an offsite commercial kitchen.  This means our meals have been served to Climatarian Kitchen patrons transported and reheated, which is less than ideal.  It also means added carbon cost to each meal due to the transportation necessary from the offsite location.

The renovations will also increase the amount of publicly accessible space in the headquarters due to accessibility and safety improvements.  With the added space, we will be able to add permanent exhibition space for our educational exhibits.  Meanwhile, we can maintain space for our highly popular Cherwell Larder Marketplace, where we distribute food surplus and other non-food items to prolong their use and cut waste.

WISH as a Social Hub

Our voluntary coordinator for WISH who works on site recognizes that the current space, prior to any of these retrofits, is already an important social hub. 

“There are people that drop in regularly now, that drop in socially,” she told us.

However, the coordinator went on to explain that because the same small space is doing multiple duties as office and classroom space, in addition to providing the social hub, the space feels disjointed and visitors are frequently forced to move from area to area or be split into multiple small rooms.

“It would have been nice to have a space where we could all sit together and do it and talk and really enjoy the social side,” our WISH voluntary coordinator said.

Renovations Will Push Us Toward Net Zero Emissions

Our project has received funding from the #VCSEEnergyEfficiencyScheme, which is helping voluntary, community, and social enterprise organisations (VCSEs) across England to deliver more efficient services for people and communities by saving money on their energy bills. We’ll be using our £62,433 VCSE Energy Efficiency Scheme grant to overhaul our building to make it more energy-efficient and less reliant on fossil fuels. Works include cavity wall insulation, new loft insulation and repairs, installation of solar panels and storage allowing us to act as an SOS site in local emergencies. The retrofit will also provide an air source heat pump with underfloor heating on the ground floor.

The administration of these funds is managed on behalf of The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) by community charity Groundwork. The scheme is funded as part of a package of over £100 million of support being delivered by the Government to help frontline delivery organisations with the increased cost of living. 

The badly needed building renovations will also help Cherwell Collective align the space with our mission to promote a greener planet.  Key items in the renovation include introducing new technologies to our building and allowing us to lead the local community by example, sharing our learnings and helping others plan to transition to net zero. By cutting our use of fossil fuels through these innovations, while also bringing our cooking on-site, we will achieve a major leap toward a goal of producing net zero emissions.

Cherwell Collective has found suppliers and contractors who understand the organization’s ethos and are willing to provide cost-effective solutions using sustainably sourced supplies. Our contractors also have stressed visitor safety as we collaborated on plans.

We Aim To Maintain Services for Our Huge Community of Users

We provide essential services to thousands of individuals in Cherwell District, with branches in Bicester and Banbury supported by our work in Kidlington. Our impact includes boosting employability skills, increasing well-being, job creation, and job safeguarding. Meanwhile, our services also help to reduce isolation by providing a regular time and place for volunteer activities. Our headquarters in Kidlington supports the most vulnerable in society with direct skills training, cost-saving services, and circular infrastructure. 

Last year, our footfall surpassed 15,500 for the direct provision of essentials. Our efforts ripple out well beyond local communities in Oxfordshire. 1,500 unique postcodes used our services in the last year. Our activities are featured as local best practices in increasing wellbeing by empowering people to play a more direct role in lowering their carbon footprints.  

We can’t understate the importance of having a place for in-person connections. Our programme research has used an established questionnaire used by the NHS that measures changes in the well-being of individuals who use our services. We found that people who came to our events in person, such as winter warmer events, had a significant and measurable increase in their well-being versus a group who only used our services to receive deliveries of goods.

Creating a Light, Bright, Happy Place for All

The quality of a space also matters in motivating visitors to use it and volunteers to staff it. Our WISH voluntary coordinator explained the vision for the fully renovated space.

“A light, bright, happy place, where people can come and meet and have the option of having a coffee any day of the week,” she said.

Renovations will enable us to continue to expand our impact. For instance, if funded, a Rural England Prosperity Fund (REPF) grant would allow us to expand our retail space in addition to our kitchen capacity, which means we can install additional climate literacy exhibits and increase the potential for green tourism locally.  Consider our local hosting of Sustainable Fashion Week in 2024 as evidence of the added value of connecting people beyond our food services. 

Over 5,000 individuals participated in our Carbon Cost of Fashion campaign in September.  For that campaign, we created an exhibition that emphasised waste reduction and supporting local, sustainable industry as solutions. That exhibition is still touring countywide before returning to WISH. This product alone not only has the potential to reduce carbon footprints but also directly supports local economic development and green transitions. Carbon Cost exhibits are a key method through which WISH increases climate literacy for all and supports broader movements toward behaviour change supporting more sustainable lifestyles.

If you would like to consider providing added financial support for our renovation, you can read more and donate here. These renovations will mean some necessary closures so please subscribe to our whatsapp community to receive real-time updates.

About WISH National Lottery Funding

WISH has just completed its first year of a five-year National Lottery-funded project for building climate resilience in Oxfordshire. These capital works were critical to our year two plans, and we are excited to be able to complete them in the first quarter and keep our project delivery ahead of schedule. The National Lottery Community Fund has four key missions, which are to support communities to come together, be environmentally sustainable, help children and young people thrive and enable people to live healthier lives, all supported by WISH’s community-based climate action activities throughout Oxfordshire.

National Lottery players raise over £30 million weekly for good causes across the UK. Thanks to them, last year The National Lottery Community Fund was able to distribute over half a billion pounds (£615.4 million) of life-changing funding to communities.

Learn more about the National Lottery Community Fund.