A Flax Corn Dolly on Blockhouse Park 2023

Last year we delivered a Flax Corn Dolly on Blockhouse Park. We’d like to do this again in April, building on the success of last year’s event, with a series of corn dolly workshops leading to a spectacular finale. We want to reach all parts of the community, bring us all together into the heart of the making and the ceremony. Release the spirit of the nature into the soil and reconnect with our ancestors traditions! The event will lead in to The Village Hub’s Feast and Ceilidh taking place that evening in Stoke Youth and Community Centre.

Stoke JarSquad

JarSquad’s goal: grow a solidarity economy whilst making communal preserves (and more!) as a squad. In collectively cooking up our shared abundance (of surplus, grown, or foraged food), we spark a rethinking on what we might value/waste/share.

Our idea: develop an offer of creative consultation, community coaching and organizing to get local groups to start their own JarSquad. Working with The Village Hub and their community pantry, we’ve identified a budding food-passionate group in Stoke we’d like to collaborate with, via a series of food-making and food-preservation sessions that centre our ethos of joy, connection, co-learning, sustainability and resilience.

Marine Edibles

We aim to enable shore communities focusing on those living in social housing and in an area of multiple deprivation to consume more of the free, healthy and sustainable food in our sea and on our shoreline. Teaching people living close to the sea, skills to catch and cook fish, forage at the shoreline and grow food at home. Marine Edibles hopes to deliver a fresh, creative and collaborative approach to eating fish, seafood and our coastline bounty. Funding will go towards rods and teaching people to fish and forage plus a cookery workshop programme.

£4 Budget Cinema Ticket for Unwaged or Low Income

The best way to watch a film is to make it an event and see it on the big screen, with an audience. We don’t want people to break the habit of coming to the cinema because they can no longer afford it. We introduced a £4 Budget price (full price £9) in a trial from 1/10/22 to 31/1/23. We sold 241 Budget tickets and welcomed 58 first-time visitors to the cinema. Plymouth Live named PAC as one of Plymouth’s kindest businesses for this initiative. We’d love the chance to make it a permanent offer and develop it further.

The Village Hub Club

Our need is working with people not for them and to ensure support is proportionate.

We have found the following useful:
Having an Emergency Fund where visitors can access provisions at a local shop
Providing Advice and Support
Sharing information at awareness events – a one stop shop
Paid advertising to reach as many people as possible.
Work with existing partnerships e.g. JarSquad learning to turn surplus food into meals
Upskilling the community by providing training on food hygiene so visitors can make nutritious meals for the community using items from our food larder.

What’s next Stoke?

Y’s Group

Social isolation can have an enormous impact on people’s health and wellbeing including: high blood pressure, heart disease, obesity, a weakened immune system, anxiety, depression, cognitive decline, Alzheimer’s disease, and even death.

We have established a community group (the Y’s Group) aimed at reducing social isolation and loneliness for senior residents aged 65+.

Meeting weekly, the group take part in activities that enable them to improve both their mental and physical health. Activities include arts, crafts, sport and heritage and the residents are accompanied by several students from Discovery College to help develop intergenerational links.