PROJECT Gateway blog - MAY 2024
MAKING IT ALL ADD UP!
Hi, I'm Walter Coxon. If you don't know me, I've been a church treasurer and church warden in my 23 years at Christ Church. On the Gateway Project I look after the finances, mostly fundraising to date, but also looking at affordability and cash flow. I have a great team helping on everything from putting together grant applications, to understanding our VAT position and what we can claim back, plus tracking your generous pledges and donations as they come in. So a big thank you to Terry Garde, Ian Hood, Sue Heavens, plus Mark Higginson who makes sure all our income gets the best possible interest rates!
Here is the May update on Project Gateway for you...
Grant Applications
We were delighted to hear a couple of months ago that we had been successful in getting a grant of £75k from the Benefact Trust. Benefact give grants for projects impacting the community and also for building improvements to protect and enhance Christian buildings.
One of the biggest grant applications we are making is to Your Fund Surrey for £495k - which you will no doubt have heard about over the last month! We asked for your support by answering a questionnaire and you spread the word far and wide; we ended up with 353 comments on the Have Your Say webpage. These comments will be reviewed by Your Fund Surrey, along with letters of support from Woking's community leaders plus the details of the project plan. We are providing a very full application pack to the fund and expect to hear the outcome in about September. Please cover this, and all our other grant applications, in prayer.
We have another six grants where we have made full applications and for which we are waiting responses on, and over the next weeks, we will be submitting a further three applications, now that we have Diocesan (historic building) permission, called a Faculty. In total we have engaged with over 30 different grant making charities, to see if they could support the Gateway project. In many cases our project doesn’t fit with the criteria for the particular charity, but we need to speak with a wide range of charities to be sure we find the ones that will support us.
Fundraiser Event! There was a fantastic fundraiser event for Gateway and the Youth trip to Turning Point in Kenya on the 11th May which raised over £4k for Gateway. Again, thank you to everyone for getting involved and having fun!
Technical and Planning Progress
On the technical side, the building plans have now moved to RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) Stage 4. The aim of this phase is to define the project in enough detail to put out a tender for the construction contract later this year, with construction scheduled to start by January 2025. As the plans gain more detail, the more accurately the team can estimate the project costs. However, its not until we get the contract tenders back that we will know the actual costs for the building work. This will be a crucial time when, in the autumn, we will have to make decisions about what we can afford as a result of all our fundraising work.
Although we have planning permission from Woking Borough Council in place, and our Diocesan Faculty, we still need to make some amendments to both of these to reflect the changes that have been made since the original planning permission was granted back in January 2020. We have a consultant helping us to submit a series of applications in time for construction to start next year.
Find out more
If you want more information about the project, or to find out how you can support it financially, take a look at our Gateway pages on ChristChurch’s website, or you can chat to any of the members of the team: Adrian Beavis (Vicar), Steve Roberts (Project Leader), Walter Coxon (Finance), Mike Pearce (Technical), Peter Wichmann (CCW building knowledge and expertise), Rachael Purvis (Project Coordinator). If you’d like to email us with a specific query you can do so at this email address: gateway@ccwoking.org.