Sometimes the people you fought for don’t get what they deserve anyway. This is one of those stories – but it still matters.
An unused retail unit on Bell Street in Wigston, Leicestershire had served its community well as a Covid vaccination centre. When government funding was withdrawn, its future looked uncertain. A coalition including PCL, Helping Hands Community Trust, Turning Point and Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust saw an opportunity. They wanted to transform Bell Street into a permanent Health & Wellness Hub. They came to TASK with one question: how do you make a grant application truly stand out?
We didn’t want to answer that in a meeting room.
Before any recommendation was made, we visited Bell Street. We sat with every partner and listened. What emerged was a portrait of a community that had learned, over the years, to distrust the systems designed to help it. People carrying addiction, poor mental health and the weight of poverty doesn’t tend to walk into formal services and ask for support. The path feels too long and too loaded. So they just don’t take it.
A drop-in Hub, with multiple services in one place, removes those barriers entirely. Once we understood that, the format of the application chose itself.
We recommended long-form video. Working with award-winning videographer Tim Sidwell of Toward Infinity Films, TASK directed the production, wrote the script and storyboard, and provided the voice over. Each partner was interviewed on camera.
The questions that drew out the real story of Bell Street only came from having done the work to understand it first.
The application for £175,000 of lottery grant was successful though two rounds. However during the third round the grant panel concluded the NHS should resource the Hub through existing allocation. A decision beyond anyone’s control. What the board did confirm, however, was that the application and its supporting material were considered highly effective. At that level of competition, that matters.
The story of Bell Street was too important to be told on a well-formatted PDF. It needed to be told by people who took the time to understand the community, their problems and the potential light at the end of the tunnel – and translate that into something a funding panel could truly feel.
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