I’ve been the Chair of Gorgeous Gorse Hill for five years, Wow! Five years! That’s just sunk in. We started this group, essentially sat round a dining table talking about what we liked and didn’t like in Gorse Hill. We are just ordinary residents who’ve never really got involved in running a community group before. Five years on we’ve learned so much and done so many things in Gorse Hill, if someone had told me we’d have mosaiced 15 concrete bollards I’d have fallen off my chair.

But here we are, all still local residents, all still volunteers. Everything we do for Gorgeous Gorse Hill is in our spare time: funding applications, writing blogs, meetings, Christmas Fairs, planting 5000 bulbs, planting 1000 snowdrops, digging, weeding, painting, sweeping and there’s lots more.

When people offer to help us, or we win a funding bid, it is huge! Every minute of help we receive, and every penny of donations are incredible, making a huge difference to what we can achieve for Gorse Hill.

So, when we were chosen to be one of the Co-operative’s Community Fund recipients for 2019/2020 we were over the moon. This means that every member who chooses us as their Community Fund, who shops in their local Co-op and buys Co-op brand products, 1% of that goes to us. This is amazing and could mean a huge amount of money raised for us.

But to achieve this we need everyone to sign up as members and choose us as their Community Fund, then we need them to get their friends and family to become members and do the same. It’s easy to do that, just follow these simple instructions.

This is an amazing opportunity for Gorse Hillers to show their love and support to their local community group.

Ruth