Creation of a ‘Community Pantry’ incorporating a fridge and freezer – food supplied by the community to assist lower income families and to provide social interaction with special events, sharing meals for all. This is a great example of the community helping itself.

There will be adult and junior courses teaching basic skills, cooking fresh healthy meals whatever your budget and encouraging family recipe books

Supporting socially isolated young adultswith a healthy, safe environment in which to socialise

A way for people to help each other with needs e.g. A fixed leaky tap could be paid for with a home-made child’sbirthday cake.

For a number of years CAST has been searching for a building which can serve not only as our office but that will also be big enough to house our ongoing projects like the Thursday Lunch Club and all our future ideas, like the cook and eat cookery courses. We have looked at a number of buildings in Bacup but they have either been unsuitable or we have lost out to businesses who can move quicker than us with ready finances. We first looked at the old Nat West Bank when it was first sold at auction. We had promising conversations with the owner at the time about leasing the ground floor for our office and ‘community zone’ but he didn’t do anything with the building and put it back in the auction. We thought that was it but the current owner of the building is using the same architects to plan uses for the building and the architect told him about CAST. So now, not only have we had promising conversations with the current owner but the Architectural Heritage Fund (AHF) gave us funding to carry out a feasibility study on the ground floor of the old Nat West Bank to find out if it will suit our purposes and how much it will cost to turn it into our Community Action Zone (CAZ) where we can have our office and run our projects. Currently the ground floor is an empty, dusty shell with a beautiful dome in the…