Thanks to Bolton Green Umbrella for £100

Over Hulton Community Group | Tuesday 10 September 2019 | 0 Comments

The story below relates to a donation of £100 made by Bolton Green Umbrella to Over Hulton Community Group back in March 2019 :

Great news for all the volunteers at Over Hulton Community Group and a big THANK YOU to Green Umbrella. This hard-working team of volunteers has finally managed to procure storage space for a host of different tools and equipment courtesy of a Green Umbrella grant. Chairman John Bullen explains, “All other groups will know exactly what I am talking about here. If you are doing litter-picking, gardening projects and other community-based projects you gradually accumulate a host of equipment, some purchased, most donated. It ends up in member's sheds and garages and I am sure I am not the only one who had to leave my car on the driveway because there is not room to get it in the garage! It reached the stage where we just had to do something. The first big breakthrough was our shopping precinct landlord giving us permission to site a unit behind our shops right next to our main gardening projects. That was massive. We looked at all sorts of different options, not only did whatever storage unit we bought have to be big enough to fit everything, it had to be secure, safe and look good as it is overlooked by neighbours. In the end we plumped for a metal shed but they are not cheap. Thankfully GREEN UMBRELLA got the ball rolling for us with a grant of £100. Next we applied to the Walsh/Provincial Trust and got £250. Local people supported us by signing up for a coach trip we put on and pretty soon we had the required £550 purchase price. After much debate we had decided on a 13 by 10 aluminium shed.

The assembly instructions when it arrived said “two men, four hours” - with us it was four men well in excess of twelve hours! This was the world's largest Meccano kit! It felt like we were blighted. We would meet up at six in the evening and the minute we got our screwdrivers out it would start to rain. By 9pm we would be like four drowned rats and we'd say “shall we meet up again tomorrow night?”

Anyway now that it is done we are very proud of it. We can't thank GREEN UMBRELLA enough – that grant got us underway.