Voluntary Action Rutland: relocating & reshaping Trustees Selling Lands' End Way Site Oakham Rutland
Voluntary Action Rutland (VAR) has provided a wide range of services to the Rutland community from its premises on Lands’ End Way, Oakham for over 23 years. Thousands of community activities and meetings have taken place at the Rutland Community Hub over this time. In its best years, more than 28,000 people a year walked through our doors. Our very popular and much-used community transport and social car scheme has been running, continuously and without a break, for nearly twice as long.
However, we now live in an economic environment in which much has changed over the last few years. Long gone are the generous government and other grants that used to underpin much of our operation. And, more recently, the economic downturn created by the COVID pandemic has all but depleted the office rental income we used to receive from companies and organisations based at our hub which, in turn, allowed us to subsidise the costs of providing high standard meeting rooms for charitable and community events and at affordable prices.
This severe negative impact on VAR’s income means that after much consideration, and with very deep regret, the Trustees have decided that we have no option but to put the Rutland Community Hub site up for sale and, later this year, to discontinue the current provision of office and meeting facilities.
This will see VAR returning to its roots as a community transport and social car service as, regrettably, providing and managing office and meeting premises at discounted rates for charities and community groups can no longer be maintained.
We are determined that, despite this most unwelcome change, VAR will remain, although operating from smaller and more affordable accommodation, so as to continue to help and support the Rutland community. In the immediate term, and for the future, our volunteer transport scheme will continue to operate as normal.
