LOCAL charity, Crosspoint has expressed its thanks to the Westbury Area Board for a £1,400 community grant.
At the meeting in December, Westbury Area Board awarded Crosspoint with a grant to fund counselling.
In a letter to the area board, Crosspoint said, “Since Crosspoint started four years ago, it has relied solely on grant funding and donations to keep going. Offering a range of services to some of the most disadvantaged people within our town and surrounding villages, we were determined to develop and improve our services to meet the needs of our clients.
“Over the past four years, an increasing number of people have been coming into the Welcome Centre in the Market Place in Westbury to access counselling, information, debt advice, food boxes and also to use the telephone and internet to search for jobs and other information.
“We were well aware of the limitations of our premises in the Market Place. Although near the centre of the town and therefore in a good geographical location, we had very little space that could be used for confidential discussions. In particular, clients who had appointments to see our counsellor had to meet with her in a room which doubled-up as an office.
“It was decided that we needed to reconfigure the internal space within our centre to turn the office into a quiet and confidential room. This involved erecting a partition in the largest room of the building to develop a new office area, and turning the previous office into a counselling room.
“We knew that this would cost in excess of £2,000, and although we had secured some of that funding by applying to a trust, we had a significant shortfall.
“After speaking to Liam Cripps, the community engagement manager for Westbury, it was agreed to submit an application for a grant for the balance of the funding to the Westbury Area Board. We were delighted to hear that we had been successful in securing £1,400 from the area board to complete this work, and now the work has been completed we are delighted with the result, as are our clients.
“These grants are vitally important to help small local organisations like ours, relying on the goodwill of volunteers and supporters, to keep going and to develop our services. This grant alone has already started to make a significant difference. We are very grateful to the area board for granting us this funding.”
