The Charity was established in 2013 having identified the lack of any comprehensive social community offer in Bacup and so began delivering its charitable purpose with its first project in 2014 - 2015, having secured grant funding for the delivery of two projects.
Past
2014 Bacup Past and Present.
A health and well-being project focussing on memories of Bacup and how to preserve them through memory box workshops. This project saw two open days in the AB&D Centre where people shared their memories of living in Bacup and 6 week long memory box workshops where people were encouraged to save their precious memories as lifetime reminders in later years.
2015 Building a Preservation Trust for Rossendale
A Heritage based project creating the charity Valley Heritage, Rossendales only building preservation trust. This project brought in funding to create and train a community group capable of bringing in funding and expertise to save our heritage buildings. Valley Heritage now work with many organisations and RBC to save, repair and repurpose our heritage buildings.
June 2016 Viability study to find CAST a new home.
This project assessed a local building and its ability to accommodate all our planned community activities, office needs etc. Unfortunately the building needed a lot of repair work and the owners were not prepared to share the cost of the work required.
October 2016 Cook n Eat with Dementia
This is a cooking project in which we take 5 mobile kitchens to out to groups to run on site cookery courses. We have run courses with Inspire and with people living with dementia and their carers.
Sept 2017 Pilot Dementia Café
This café ran for 16 weeks in Central Methodist church hall to asses the need for such a resource. As well as a café with a simple, healthy menu we also provided dementia friendly activities. It was a successful pilot at the end of which the attendees did not want it to close.
2017 – 2019 Rossendale Heritage Listing Project.
This project saw us working with the community to identify heritage assets in Rossendale and place them on a register which will afford them some protection against future loss. It included historic and heritage talks about Rossendale and even though the project has been completed the community can still nominate heritage assets to go on a register.
Jan 2018 Launch of Reminiscence Café .
After the successful pilot for a dementia café we opened The Reminiscence Café, still in Central Methodist Church Hall and continued to provide dementia friendly activities and outings as well as being a social gathering for those in the community who are socially isolated or lonely. The Reminiscence Café has now moved into the AB&D Centre and is now called The Thursday Lunch Club. See ‘Our Lunches’.
2018 – 2019 Establishment of a Community Benefit Society to redevelop St. John the Evangelist Church
We worked with the owner of St John the Evangelist Church to help him establish a community group to run and oversee community projects and activities.
2018 – 2020 Activities and support of the Reminiscence Café
These are the projects and activities we received funding for and the fundraisers we ran to support the café.
2019 – 2022 Capacity Building for CAST – Providing two temporary part time staff.
As our workload increased we received funding to employ 2 temporary part-time staff to look after the advertising and promotion of CAST and be extra pairs of hands.
2021 Memories by Post
This project was run from home through the post. It kept the café customers in touch with each other through sending notecards and memory boxes were created with diaries, scrapbooks and personal memorabilia. All the resources and information were sent through the post and over the phone over an 8 month time period.