The plan
St James Street Big Local is a resident-led community organisation investing more than £1 million in the St James Street area of Walthamstow.
The Big Local began in earnest in 2016, and will run until 2026. Roughly every three years, we produce a plan explaining what we intend to do next. This is the third plan, which looks at what we have done so far, considers what residents have told us they’d like to see more of, and lays out our ideas for the next few years.
As it is our final plan, we also consider our legacy - what we would like the long-term impact of our work in the St James Street area to be.
Background
The Big Local programme is an experiment in resident-led decision making. It gives 150 communities in England at least £1 million each, and allows them the freedom to decidehow the money is spent…
action plan
The majority of our work can be divided into four themes: People, Places, Charities, and Business. However, in our final plan we have decided to merge Charities into People, reducing this to three themes.
our impact so far
St James Street is quite a different area in 2022 to how it was just a few years ago. A car park that felt unsafe for many residents to walk through at night has been replaced by CRATE …
consultation
In April 2022, we launched a six-week consultation to find out what residents thought our priorities for the area should be…
St James Street Big Local – Interim Progress update Dec-2024
St James Street Big Local is a resident-led community organisation investing more than £1 million in the St
James Street area of Walthamstow which began in earnest in 2016, and will run until 2026.
In 2022 we produced a plan which reported what we had done so far, and outlined our ideas for the
remaining years, based on feedback from local residents.
Progress against 2022 plan
grants
• £19,181 has been paid to local organisations and residents to support a range of local initiatives via
our community grants programme.
• £15,000 has been paid out of the ring-fenced Legacy fund of £200,000 to 2 organisations located in
our area - Spark2Life and Waltham Forest Migrant Action with the remainder due to be paid in the
coming year.
• £13,500 of the Covid-19 recovery funds was awarded to 5 local primary schools (Mission Grove,
South Grove, Stoneydown Park, St Patrick’s, Barn Croft) to support families with IT equipment for
home schooling of pupils.
Events
We used £7,194 to run a range of Community Events including:
• Christmas Carol concerts in December 2022, 2023 & 2024
• Eid Al-Fitr event in High Street April 2024
• Summer Fair in Stoneydown Park August 2024
• Jumble Trail September 2022, 2023 & 2024
People
Contributing £39,905 we used matched-funding from London Borough of Waltham Forest and the GLA
Grow Back Greener to create the community Buxton Road Garden outside Mission Grove school and along
Mission Grove.
Operating Costs
During this period, we have spent:
• £67,045 employing 3 members of staff.
• £24,186 on operational support costs covering office rental, utilities, insurance, IT costs, printing
costs.
• Room hires for our partnership meetings accounted for £1,932
• Working jointly with the William Morris Big Local we appointed an independent consultant at a cost
of £3,050 to produce an interim impact evaluation report in Jan 2023 which we used to decide on
our strategy for our legacy.
Planned Spend to end of Project
Of the £290,400 remaining in our budget, we have plans in place for the following:
• £185,000 for Legacy Grants - of which £135,000 is allocated to two organisations and a grant
awarding process in underway for the remaining £50,000,
• £28,000 for our community grants programme,
• £11,200 for local public Art works – in conjunction with the local authority plans for Courtenay Place
as part of the St James Quarter regeneration,
• £9,000 for our final year events
• £53,200 for staffing and operational support,
• £4,000 on a final evaluation report.
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Over the next three years, we will work with support from the Local trust (the charity which oversees the Big Local) to gain a better understanding of how our work is making a difference in our local community. This will involve in-depth interviews with our grant recipients, and surveys of local residents.
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We would like to thank all residents who have served on our committee over the past three years and contributed to our work, including: Heather Alcock, Shehnaz Awan, Nikki Bigmore, Mel Brown, David Bryan, Amber Donovan, Pete Farnham, Thilini Gunaratna, Mia Johnson-Hall, Martha Lawson, Libbi Lee, Laura Marmion, Jacqueline McManus, Bel Meharry, Sophie Nellis, Vivienne Perry, Sebastian Salek, Linda Sansum, Jacqueline Sheehy, Dan Smith, and Joanna Wilson.
We are also grateful to all of the residents who took part in our consultation, as well as all of our volunteers and partners, including our locally trusted organisation, CREST, and Gayle Wallace, whose guidance as our rep has been invaluable.
We would particularly like to thank our programme manager, Rachel Carder, for her tireless work to put our ideas into action.
If you live in the St James Street area and are interested in joining the partnership, please email stjamesbiglocal@gmail.com