Grants worth £12,000 to boost community projects

CHARITIES and good causes in Henley have been awarded grants totalling almost £12,000.

>body9light<The Louis Baylis Trust, which owns the Henley Standard, made the awards following an application process last year.

>body9light<Greener Henley received £2,500  to help it revamp its Nature Squared campaign to create 5,000m2 by 2030, a 10-fold increase of the current 500m2 target.

>body9light<>kern 0.18pt<The campaign is run in conjunction with Henley Town Council and the Henley Standard to encourage local residents, businesses and other organisations to plant a metre square of wildflowers in their green spaces.>kern 0pt<

>body9light<Kate Oldridge, the executive director of Greener Henley, said the new grant will be used to recruit and support volunteer plant parents and baby plant fosterers.

>body9light<She said: “The idea is to have groups plant 1m2 of wildflowers. We haven’t had the resources but we’re trying to raise £200,000.

>body9light<“We recently got a grant of £4,000 for the project and we plan to launch a £5,000 crowd fundraiser in April, which will be match-funded by Big Give’s Earth Raise campaign.

>body9light<“The  grant from the trust will be used to support our growers with the necessary resources to bring on plants for our native wildlife. These plants would be distributed among our interested Nature Squared followers’ activities, such as plant swaps.

>body9light<“We would use gardening volunteers for loaned plots and advisers for new gardeners and guardians to monitor the ongoing health of the public spaces in the campaign.”

>body9light<Ms Oldridge said the project is important as the council declared a climate and emergency in 2024. She added: “>kern 0.18pt<We’re in a nature emergency as we only have 53 per cent of our biodiversity left and what we need to understand is that nature is one of the resources that we could lose, this includes water, so it’s critical to protect.”>kern 0pt< 

>body9light<The Bell Surgery Charitable Trust received a £2,000 grant towards its goal of £12,000 to buy a health screening kiosk and equipment for the surgery, such as chairs, for the benefit of their patients.

>body9light<Liz James, who chairs  the trustees, said: “We applied for the grant as part of our campaign because we wanted to raise £12,000 for a health kiosk for our patients where they can take their blood pressure and get health questions answered, which goes onto their medical file. It’s quite an expensive piece of kit that we’ve been fundraising for the last few months, which we hope to have shortly.

>body9light<>kern 0.18pt<“Thanks to the generosity of our patients, attendees of the Living Advent Calendar, which raised £760 and the Louis Baylis Trust, we have been able to reach our target.”>kern 0pt< 

>body9light<>kern 0.216pt<Riverside Counselling Service, a mental health charity, received a £2,000 grant to help provide a subsidised rate to its clientele from its hardship fund.>kern 0pt<

>body9light<>kern 0.18pt<Chief executive Sophie Wellings said: “The bulk of our work is one-to-one counselling and central to our ethos is that no one is excluded from our service.>kern 0pt<

>body9light<“Everybody pays something but we wanted to make it as accessible as possible so we offer people to pay based on their household income, which is as little as £10.

>body9light<“We have a hardship fund which makes sure that nobody is excluded on the basis of cost so people who can’t afford our minimum can still get counselling.”

>body9light<Ms Wellings says the service works with 350 people every year and provides 5,000 one-to-one counselling sessions.

>body9light<>kern 0.18pt<She added: “Services can be very expensive and, although statutory provisions, however wonderful, the waiting lists can be long and there can be a stigma attached to going through public services as people may be worried about it staying on their medical file.”>kern 0pt< 

>body9light<Others were  1st Henley Scouts, which received £1,500, Henley Churches Debt Centre and Headway Thames Valley, which each received £1,000, Henley Youth Choir, which received £787, Café Mortality and Sacred Heart School, which each received £500 and the Henley Talking Newspaper, which received £200.

>body9light<Peter Sands, chairman of the Louis Baylis Trust, said: “With the acquisition of the Henley Standard just a year ago, we have seen quite a number of applications from that area and our response has indeed been positive.

>body9light<“These range from a ‘Digital Health Kiosk’ at the Bell Street surgery to Café Mortality and from the Debt centre at Henley Churches to Greener Henley.

>body9light<“We look forward to seeing some interesting applications in the future and although it is a new area for us, I am sure it has needs where grant aid can help, like every other town in the region.”

>body9light<>body9light<The Louis Baylis Trust is named after the former proprietor of the Maidenhead Advertiser. Ownership of the newspaper was handed to the trust in 1962 to ensure its future independence and support good causes in the town.

>body9light<The trust, which  also owns the Slough and Windsor Express, acquired the Henley Standard from Higgs Group last year. The newspapers are all published for the trust under licence by Baylis Community Media, an independent community interest company.

>body9light<>kern 0.18pt<Mr Sands  said: “As is the case in Maidenhead, Windsor and Slough, the  Henley Standard is an integral part of the community and provides an important function within and for that community by reporting, questioning and sometimes challenging issues and incidents.>kern 0pt<

>body9light<“The trust is very well aware of this important role and is happy in turn to provide support back into the respective communities.”