Can we help raise cash for and design a new community space for Bevendean and Moulsecoomb?
We are a group of local residents and supporters who have come together to re-open the old Bevendean pub as a much needed community resource. The Bevendean Community Pub Limited is a Community Benefit Society specifically designed for community schemes such as ours, regulated by the FSA.
We have adopted the Plunkett Foundation model rules and have a management committee who meet regularly.
What's the plan?
We plan to run the pub as a co-operative providing facilities and services for residents and community groups.
The building is owned by the East Brighton Trust who have given us a lease rent free for two years to establish the venture.
Our vision
We need to raise £200,000 to rebuild and open as a community venue with a pub, community kitchen, cafe and meeting facilities.
The Bevendean will be the first co-operative pub on a housing estate in the UK. But it will be so much more than just a pub - it will be a community hub in the area where 18,000 people are without a pub, decent cafe and somewhere to meet.
We want The Bevy to be somewhere we can all be proud of and show what is possible when people come together to work as a community!
The Brief - Part 1 - Crowdfunding
We have launched our share issue to raise cash but more importantly community buy-in.
Obviously we want to raise as much money through shares, but with Moulsecoomb in the button 5% of deprivation in the country, we know that cash is the one thing the estate doesn't have.
Bank loans are an option but as we are leasing the property we need to find a guarantor to get one.
So we need to come up with a plan to generate more cash and we need to extend the reach of our fundraising efforts and inspire people in other parts of Brighton, the UK and, if possible, the rest of the world to get involved in The Bevy and be prepared to give their money to support it.
A few months ago we were approached by Spacehive crowdfunding site but they decided in the end they couldn't help, telling us: "it's a really exciting project, and we'd love to support it, but at the moment I don't think we can - primarily because you're looking to do shared ownership/share issues - we're not geared up to provide that kind of service at the moment, and doing it online is fraught with a number of regulatory issues we're not really tooled up to take on right now."
We would therefore like help with the following:
- Investigate the legalities of a co-op and crowd funding
- If feasible, what are the most effective crowd funding routes?
- What aspect of The Bevy would people be most likely to support?
- Create a pitch campaign to launch by the end of the weekend that takes our message and funding ambition out to the rest of the world!
The Brief - Part 2 - Design Proposal
We want The Bevy to be 'more than a pub'.
We would like it to provide several functions:
- A Pub serving a range of real ales from local breweries and freshly prepared meals as far as practicable from locally sourced ingredients and even from our own garden.
- A Cafe - we plan to divide the pub and cafe areas
- A Community Kitchen with training facilities
- An Edible Garden, producing food
- Meeting facilities for local community groups
- A venue for events
We have a set of plans we have been working on. The building is currently an empty shell but we have a unique opportunity to create a special space, potentially using reclaimed, recycled and community sourced materials and operating sustainably.
We want to look into ways of producing our own electricity, a green roof, composting and recycling, we would like ideas and input to add to the design process and we would like you to help produce a set of visualisations to show people what the pub could be!
