Save York Gardens

Last Monday, we were delighted to welcome Ian Noble from Lloyds Banking Group who came to present a cheque for £5,000. This donation comes from the Lloyds Bank Community Fund after York Gardens Library and Community Centre won a public vote. The money will allow us to continue run programmes for young people at the library and community centre. Thank you again to everyone who voted for YGL – your votes have made a big difference. Stakeholders of the library and community centre were joined by councillors and members of the library staff to mark the occasion, which was a great chance to thank everyone for their hard work over the past year.

New opening hours

Following feedback from users of the library, the opening hours of the library have changed. The new hours allow the library to be opened before noon, three mornings a week, for the first time since the library and community centre reopened as a direct services organisation in November 2011. It also means that Baby Rhyme Time will now be on a Wednesday at 11am. We hope to see you at the library soon.

Monday – Closed
Tuesday – 12 to 6pm
Wednesday – 10 to 7pm
Thursday – 12 to 5pm
Friday – 11 to 5pm
Saturday – 11 to 3pm
Sunday – Closed

We are absolutely delighted to be able to announce that we’ve won £5,000 from Lloyds Banking Group’s Community Fund. Thank you to everyone who voted – the votes really did count and now we can use that money to keep programmes for young people at the library going. We look forward to reporting back on how the money is being spent.

The library has had a busy summer and more exciting things continue to happen. In July, there was a great family sports day (generously supported by the Thomas’s Foundation) in York Gardens, as a celebration of the UK’s Olympic summer and the library is now fantastically decorated with artwork created by children from a number of local schools, alongside other art created by the library’s weekly craft club. It all looks fantastic. Thanks to our wonderful librarians, the summer reading events all went really well too.

In September, a group from Lloyds Banking Group helped us out as part of a Community Day, and have refreshed some of the paintwork in the main hall. They also delivered some leaflets to us in the local area, which have already had a response.

Staff from Lloyds Banking Group painting in the main hall at York Gardens Library as part of their Community day

Now the nights are drawing in, the school terms are underway and we are looking forward to everything else to come a York Gardens Library. A few things to look out for:

- Drama club has now restarted on Wednesday evenings. With thanks to WoW Mums and Thomas’s Foundation for their support of the club. We hope it will be as successful as last year.

- GCSE Success, the one-to-one free GCSE tuition for year 10 and year 11 students from the Kambala, York Road and Winstanley estates begins again on the 6th October and will run on Saturday mornings. They now have their own website here

- The library now has WiFi and we are planning to reintroduce newspapers very soon.
We are also delighted to report that we are getting lots of bookings for the community rooms at the library, so the building is being well used at the moment. Do remember to consider the library if you are planning a function or event. There are several great rooms available at reasonable prices and the library has a kitchen and AV equipment available.

Please keep an eye out for an upcoming change in opening times at the library – they will be posted here. We are going to be opening the library one morning per week, following feedback from those of you who use the library.
If you have any feedback on the library, community rooms or if you are interested in volunteering at the library or on a community project, please do get in touch.

Well, the British ‘summer’ continues… As I write, the rain continues to pour. But York Gardens Library is always a good place to go to escape the weather and sit down for a while with a book. Did you know that, while the library is now mostly a children’s library, it still stocks a small collection of titles for adults?

And we are hoping for a beautiful sunny day this coming Saturday, 7th July, when we will be hosting an exciting Olympic-themed event at York Gardens Library. Supported by the Thomas’s School Foundation, the Family Fun Event runs from 10am to 12noon. It features an exhibition of art produced by children from local schools Christ Chuch, Falconbrook. Sacred Heart and Westbridge. There’ll be sports events that children can join in and prizes available. And there’ll be free food and drink on offer, supplied by local businesses.

At 11.30 there’ll be a special prize giving event, with the Mayor of Wandsworth and Olympic gold medallist Louis Attrill.

We really hope you can join us for what is sure to be a great event.

Help us raise much-needed funds for York Gardens

We have been very lucky to have been shortlisted by the Lloyds Banking Group Community Fund, as potential winners of a £5,000 donation towards events for young people. The winners will be chosen by public vote and we need your help to gain as many votes as possible.

What you need to do to help YGLCC win £5,000 to fund projects for young people.
1. Please click on the link below and vote. You will also need to verify the vote (you’ll receive and email after voting on the website and you’ll need to click on the link in it). You can also vote by text – instructions below.
2. Please ask all your friends, family, neighbours and anyone else in your contact book to vote as well. You could also promote this by mentioning it on your facebook profile, LinkedIn page or Twitter feed…  Link to www.facebook.com/yorkgardenslibrary if you like or Retweet @saveyglibrary
3. Keep reminding people to vote until you’re sure they have!
The link: https://www.lloydsbankinggroupcommunities.com/communityfund/CF_Org_Vote_Profile.asp?CFOIDS=10000498

You can also vote by texting VOTESW5 to 61119.

Thank you! And we hope to see you at YGLCC soon.

One of the new activities that has been running at York Gardens Library & Community Centre since it reopened in November has been a drama club, supported by the Thomas’s Foundation and organised by the Women of Wandsworth (WoW). The drama club runs weekly and is attended by around 30 children.  It is a ten week course, ending with a short theatrical piece to which the children can invite their parents and friends.

Carryl Thomas, the teacher, is a Stagecoach trained tutor and also an actress herself with a recurring role in the Doctor Who spin off “The Adventures of Sarah Jane” and “Family affair”.

The classes are proving very popular with the children who attend them. They are developing confidence and public speaking skills, while also having a lot of fun. The funding provided means that the classes cost just £1 per session for the children that attend, making it accessible to families for whom some other classes are out of reach. Any proceeds are donated to the Friends group to go towards keeping the library and community centre open.

Other innovative activities at the library at the moment include capoeira, one-to-one GCSE tutoring and the craft club.  Soon, there will  be an extension to the homework club. More activities for adults are also being considered and the popular Bridge Club continues to meet in the Community Hall twice a week and is very well attended.

For more information about what’s going on at YGLCC, look at our facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/yorkgardenslibrary

This is the first blog post in a little while but a lot has been going on at York Gardens Library and Community Centre. The librarians and the Friends group have all been busy developing the plans for how we will continue to keep the library running and make sure it is providing really useful services for the local community.

In December, the library and community centre’s first Christmas Fayre raised more than £400 which will go towards keeping the library open and continuing to run activities for local people.

If you’ve passed the library on a Saturday morning recently, you will have noticed a lot of activity. Local volunteer Ella Spencer is running tutoring sessions in GCSE English and Maths, working with a group of volunteers including several students from Imperial College London. The sessions are proving popular with students from nearby schools.

A new capoiera group is being held on a Tuesday after school. The popular drama groups for primary school children are continuing to rehearse on a Wednesday. And the library is fabulously decorated at the moment with works from the craft club, held on a Thursday. Homework club for 7-14 year olds continues to run on a Friday from 4-6pm.

If you are interested in finding out more about any of these activities please ask the librarians, or contact us by email. We are also still looking for more volunteers and of course the community rooms are available to hire.

We are delighted to welcome Andrea Marcs, the new library manager, who joined us in February. Andrea is looking forward to meeting library users and bringing more people from the local area in to the library.

We’ll be featuring more about the various groups and clubs at the library in future posts. If there’s anything that you’re keen to hear more about just let us know.

On 17 December, York Gardens Library and Community Centre will host its first Christmas Fayre.  We hope that this will be a great way to celebrate the festive season, by opening up the Community Hall to a wide range of local sellers and buyers of seasonal goods!

We are lining up an exciting range of stallholders and it promises to be a great family afternoon out.  If you’d like to take a stall, or would like to see a particular business there, please let us know (yorkgardenslibrary@googlemail.com).  Stalls cost £55 with all proceeds going to the Friends of York Gardens.  These funds will help us to meet our challenging fundraising target of £70,000/year, needed to keep the library and community centre open.

The Fayre itself will start at midday and run till 4pm, with entry fees of £1 (50p for concessions).  Please do join us and spread the word!

On Tuesday night Wandsworth’s Mayor, Jane Cooper, joined members of the local community, the Friends of York Gardens Library, councillors, volunteers and others to formally reopen York Gardens Library and Community Centre. Councillor Jonathan Cook, who is responsible for libraries in Wandsworth, spoke about the fact that libraries around the country are facing challenges and change and that the model being used at York Gardens is a new way of doing things that may be an example for others to follow to enable services to continue to operate in the face of significant budget cuts.

Sonia Francis-Mills, the Chair of the Friends of York Gardens Library, thanked those who had been involved in setting up the new structure for running the library which means that it is still open, when otherwise it would have closed earlier in the year. But she also noted the continued disappointment that it was this particular library, of the 11 neighbourhood libraries across Wandsworth, that had been marked out for treatment in this way and that there are still major challenges ahead in ensuring that the library can remain open, especially recruiting volunteers, raising awareness and generating enough income to cover the shortfall left by cuts to the council’s budget.

The library was open for business from Tuesday and it was great to see it packed full of people, particularly teenagers reading and doing their homework. The layout has been changed a little to allow for an additional room that people can hire for functions, training sessions or classes. The children’s library and IT suite remain and the library also continues to have a small selection of books for adults.

What is a Direct Services Organisation? York Gardens has been set up as a Direct Services Organisation and we’ve been trying to work out what it means over the past few months. Here’s how it has been defined: As a Direct Services Organisation, YGLCC operates as an ‘arms length’ part of Wandsworth Council.  The DSO is still accountable to the Council for approval of its activities and the setting of its targets, fees and charges.  The Council still provides the revenue budget for which officers are responsible and accountable.  The budget – income and expenditure – is ringfenced to the DSO and is not used to sustain other Council budgets or activities.

We have added a page to this website, which you can get to from the link ‘On Offer at YLGCC’ at the top right of this page, which has details about the library opening times and room hire. If you want any more information at all please contact us on yorkgardenslibrary@googlemail.com

York Gardens Library and Community Centre will be hosting a reopening event on Tuesday 1st November from 6pm to 8pm. The Mayor of Wandsworth will be joining us to formally reopen the library, which was due to close over the summer. Fortunately, the community campaign to save the library means that the doors of the library will once again be open to readers and the community rooms will be available to hire at new reduced rates.

The library is now formally a Direct Service Organisation and has been called by others a ‘Big Society’ library, meaning that the council will be passing responsibility for some of the activities that happen at York Gardens to a community group called The Friends of York Gardens Library.

The Friends group are working to ensure that the centre continues to serve the local community. A number of exciting new activities for local children and young people will be run in the community rooms from November onwards, including drama and tae kwan do. We hope to add more soon, so if you have ideas for what would be popular, let us know by emailing yorkgardenslibrary@gmail.com  You can also hire out the rooms for your own events – parties, meetings, weddings etc.

Come along and join us on the 1st to celebrate the fact that the library is open and find out more about what York Gardens Library & Community Centre has to offer you.

We’ve just confirmed the reopening date for York Gardens Library and Community Centre as the 1st November. There’ll be a small event that evening to mark it’s reopening and any supporters of the library will be welcome to come along. Most importantly, from then on we hope that many people in the community will continue to support us by coming in to borrow books, use the community rooms, join in activities and sign up as volunteers.

If you’re interested in volunteering you can contact us now: yorkgardenslibrary@gmail.com

If you’d like to book a room to hire, you can call Hilary on 020 8871 8848. There are several rooms to hire: a 4 person interview room, three rooms with capacity of 50, and the large community hall (capacity up to 200) which has a kitchen facility. Charges have been revised and reduced to make them more affordable.
The library itself will continue to have activities running for children and adults and we have plans for some home-grown community activities, to meet the needs of local people. We currently have a questionnaire which you can fill out to tell us about the sorts of activities you’d like to see at York Gardens. If you would like to know more and provide feedback, email us at yorkgardenslibrary@gmail.com or contact us via Twitter @saveyglibrary

See you in November!