Castlehaven Community Enterprises

 Thu, June 20, 2019

Castlehaven Community Association has been serving its local Camden Town neighbourhood providing learning and engagement opportunities inclusively for all members of our community as well as combatting the area’s inherent anti-social behaviour for over three decades.

We aim to serve our local people for the next thirty years as well. However, this is no longer straightforward as local authority investment has depleted and grant funding becomes unavailable. To ensure we are here for years to come, CCA set up Castlehaven Community Enterprises in order to raise money through its own social enterprise businesses to support the CCA charity move towards the future. Our current social enterprise businesses include The Littlehaven Nursery and the Castlehaven Sports Pitch, each of which contributes 100% of its profits to CCA.

Moving forward we are looking to develop other revenue streams from future businesses and events large and small which the community both approves of and benefits from. In addition to a sustainable community outreach programme and operational community centre, additional benefits could be local employment and the delivery of needed local goods and services.

We have had many suggestions from our members for the types of events and services our community would like to see commissioned by Castlehaven, one of which was seasonal farmers market and car boot events. Last week we took the opportunity to consult our members database to canvas opinion about hosting these types of events on a seasonal ad hoc event basis. The results were phenomenal with over a third of members completing the survey and 95% indicating a positive response.

It must be said, however, that concerns have been raised by a small minority of the community and CCA reiterates that it is not within its or the community’s interest to promote any event or activity that would instigate any type detrimental effect to the local area.

After further consultancy with local authority and local businesses, and a decision will be made as to whether to pursue these types of events and an update will be sent as soon as more information is available.

In the meantime, you can view the full survey results here