Parkside Community Hall
Chairman’s Annual Report April 2021
Since the last AGM in April 2020 the hall has mainly been closed due to the Covid Pandemic. Our 2020 AGM was held in lockdown and as such all AGM business and re-election of officers and members was conducted via email. At the time of writing this year’s report in March 2021 we find ourselves in similar circumstances, with the hall closed, national lockdown in place, and the 2021 AGM to be conducted via email.
The hall has had a difficult year. We have taken advantage of the government furlough scheme and initially we managed to retain both our members of staff. The hall closed for business on 19[th] March 2020 and saw us cancel the first of 4 planned comedy night events which was scheduled for 20[th] March. We had hoped to reopen in May, but this sadly did not happen. The hall briefly reopened in September with extensive Covid precautions in place for a restricted group of hirers, but sadly closed again in early November and staying open until early December. As Central Beds went into Tier 4 restrictions and then national lockdown just before Christmas the hall closed again on 17[th] December and has remained closed ever since. The Chairman is very appreciative of both Eileen Summerfield and Steve Todd in managing these difficult circumstances and especially to Steve for making the hall compliant to government Covid physical requirements.
Financially the hall has benefited from several grants from Central Beds, and the committee are very grateful to the sterling work carried out by our Town Councillor and Trustee Roy Tebbutt for all his hard work in progressing these grants.
In September we made a difficult decision around redundancy. With no clear timeline for a return to normal at the hall, and without any weekend events or volunteer rota needing to be produced the sad decision was taken to make one member of staff redundant. The Chairman is grateful to both Claire Rance and Steve Todd for their assistance through this difficult set of circumstances.
Whilst in Lockdown in January we managed to complete the legal agreement between Parkside Hall and Central Beds regarding temporary parking permits with the Coroner’s court. It is good to finally (after 5 years) to get the agreement in place which will run for a further 5 years until 02 OCT 2026.
Looking forward the Hall is optimistic that it will be able to reopen in April 2021, but again with restricted user groups. It remains unclear how the country as a whole with move out of lockdown restrictions and whether previous users’ groups will return to Parkside.
In the short term we need to recruit either a replacement for Eileen Summerfield our bookings clerk or pay for this service to be carried out. Eileen will continue on the committee but has requested to step down from the bookings role as soon as we can find a replacement.
A strange year for Parkside and its committee, we look forward to getting back to normal!
Andy Wood
Chairman of Trustees
15[th] March 2021
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