The Featherston Community Centre will be holding its Annual General Meeting for 2014 on the 24 July, 7.30 pm – 9.00pm at the Centre at 14 Wakefield Street. Dr. Harsha will be a guest speaker with a talk on ‘How to Stay Healthy’. The agenda will include a minor amendment to the Constitution and a light supper will follow. To be nominated for the Board, please contact Sonya at 021 302 585 or fns.comcen@xtra.co.nz
Need some help and support to take control of your money? CAP Money offers a money management course at the Centre this month. A CAP Money course can provide you with the right tools to help you manage your finances, and take steps to avoid debts. It has already started but you can still join them for the second session – they will help you catch up!
Course dates & times:
May 14th, 21st, and 28th : 7.30pm – 9pm.
For more information or to register your interest please contact Carole Needham on 06 308 9369 or Jo Gibson on jo.gibson@orcon.net.nz
Food provided.
Siv Fjaerestad, the Centre’s Manager, who has been on maternity leave since last year will be returning part-time on Friday’s from 9.30am – 12.30pm. Welcome back! For now, relieving Manager Mary Mason will continue Monday through Thursday, 8am – 1pm.
We’ve given our website a bit of a makeover. In the first instance, we’ve reorganised and updated the content to make things easier to find especially with regards to what’s on when, who can be contacted, what’s on offer in terms of facilities at the Centre and how you can go about booking it if you were interested. In the second instance, we’ve refreshed the design and look and feel. The idea was to retain the original site’s cleanliness, simplicity and clarity but improve it such that it would work well no matter the device you use to visit the site. This means it should be just as readable and functional on a mobile phone screen as it is on a large computer monitor. If you do find any issues with the site or which to provide any feedback or suggestions, please feel free to send it through.
Ask not: ‘what can your community centre do for you?’, but rather ‘what can you do for your community centre?’. Are you a dab hand with a hammer and would be keen to help on one of our biannual working bees? Do you have green thumbs and could help out with our flourishing garden? Are you a computer whizz and able to lend your expertise to maintaining our IT infrastructure or working on our website? Do you have a few free hours to help run the Centre’s front desk and extend the hours that it can be kept open? Do you have skills in marketing, communications, property maintenance or finance that you could lend to one of the Centre’s sub-committees or would you be interested in becoming a Board member? If you do think you might be able to help the Centre in any way (no matter how small) and were interested in doing so, please contact the Centre’s Manager.
Thanks to some generous funding grants from our major supporters, we will be able to go ahead with a few renovations at the Centre this year. In particular, our bathroom and the main entrance require some immediate work so that they can be brought inline with the latest Council access and fire safety standards. In addition to those alterations, we’ll be improving the entrance to the Kauri room (aka the ‘Lounge’) as well as creating a brand new office space in place of the underutilised ‘waiting area’. We’ll keep you posted on progress.
Last year, the Centre received the very generous donation of eight kit-set, raised garden beds and a load of topsoil. They were cleaned, assembled and made ready for planting with the help of a few local lads. The community then rallied to provide seeds and seedlings and now the boxes sport a wonderful array of vegetables, herbs and flowers that would make even Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall proud. We have potatoes, silverbeet, beetroot, carrots, Jerusalem artichokes, leeks, tomatoes, parsley, radishes, celery, zucchini and peas interspersed with marigolds and wildflowers. Not only is at a very attractive feature to have as part of the Community Centre grounds, it is also a way we can supply fresh produce to those in the community that need it most.