2024-25: An essential hub for community activity

During 2024-25, the Resource Centre has continued being a lively hub of community activity, providing essential services for small groups in the city. When our front desk is open, four days a week, the Centre is filled with groups dropping in for DIY print, collecting or returning equipment, asking for advice, and telling us what they are doing and learning. The Centre’s abuzz with the sounds of organisers doing community work, meeting each other, and sharing ideas and information.

A total of 592 different groups used our services during the year, making 1987 visits and phone calls to the Centre. At our AGM in October 2024, we reflected on the impact these groups have had in the city, in their communities and for their volunteer organisers. To support their work, we provided:

Printing service: skills, connections, and printing too!

288 groups used our print room during the year, making 1685 uses of our equipment altogether. By far the majority of these uses were DIY, instead of groups requesting staff to do their printing for them on a send-and-collect basis.

We’re delighted with this as it reaffirms what we have learned: groups really value being able to do their own printing, in a community-focused space, with full control over the process. Community organisers get the opportunity to learn new skills with new print equipment and design programmes, and can discuss the aims and impact of printed material with workers who understand the context and importance of their work.

Being in the Centre is also an opportunity to meet community organisers from different groups, find out more about what is going on in other parts of the city, and build connections and community. It is a hub of information exchange, with knowledge being built and shared among everyone in the Centre, workers and users alike.

Women of Colour said: “I’ve been amazed by what’s available and by the learning and sharing that’s going on between staff and all the people who use the Centre. There’s a lot of skill sharing going on. You also make it easy to access resources – thank you for the simplicity, you make my life easier.”

Equipment hire: shared resources for the city

336 groups made 1407 equipment hire uses during 2024-25:

  • Equipment for meetings and indoor events: 411
  • Fundraising equipment: 643
  • Play equipment: 353

We know groups are facing a particularly difficult fundraising landscape at the moment, and use of our equipment allows groups to organise fundraising events. In our most recent survey (2024), we asked groups how much money they had raised at their most recent fundraising event and the average amount was £2,900. Based on this figure, we estimate that our equipment hire service helped groups in the city raise over £650,000 for their vital work during 2024-25.

During the year, we added some new items to our equipment for hire:

Information and advice: simply invaluable

Our online information service provides free, clearly-written guidance for community group organisers. All of our information is developed in response to questions from our user groups, and based on the insight we have gained from years of working with and learning from the experiences of our member groups.

We routinely receive enquiries from organisations all over the country (and around the world) asking to share our resources. We are always happy to oblige, provided we are appropriately credited.

In 2024-25:

  • We had 3,964 uses of the information pages on our website from people in Brighton and Hove, and 213,701 views of our information pages from around the globe.
  • Our drop-in, advice on demand service was used by 78 different groups on a total of 215 occasions.
  • We carried out 287 longer support sessions with 42 different groups. This support covered 38 different topics, with the most frequent enquiries being fundraising, budgeting, reporting to funders, book-keeping, legal structures, committee roles, and communications.
  • As part of the above we supported 27 groups with fundraising applications, budgeting and book-keeping. The total grant income raised as a result of our support was £92,859.
  • We carried out 48 examinations of accounts.

Our consistently available advice and support for member groups continues to be valued and appreciated. New groups find us approachable and helpful, and the groups we have worked with for many years often express how critical the support of the Resource Centre is to enable them to survive and do the things their communities need. For example, our member groups said this year:

“The Resource Centre have been great at explaining the complexities of formalising our group. They were able to meet us where we are at and helped clarify the next steps to take. This support is crucial to keep this valued community group running.” Neurodiversity Meet-Up

“Without the Resource Centre’s help we would not be who we are today as one strong community and we are very grateful to them. Every time we face a challenge, they always there for us to help.” Soof Egg (Vision for a Better Future)

“Their delivery, advice and availability are impeccable, the team are so lovely and efficient. We are blessed to have them in our community for support.” AlNoure Academy

“Without the help of everybody at the Resource Centre I seriously doubt whether Hollingdean RA could have continued operating. You backed us up at a time when the secretary and chair have suffered periods of illness. I can only thank your staff at a time we really needed it.” Hollingdean Residents’ Association 

Page updated: May 2025