Sutton Poyntz

15 November 2022 - Mission Hall Newsletter 2: feedback evening planned

The Mission Hall Committee were blown away by the number and quality of the replies we received in response to our earlier Newsletter and Survey. The Mission Hall is clearly important to you all, so we will shortly be asking the Church for a Lease extension. You have also been thinking carefully and positively about how the Hall can be improved. Thank you all so much. Thank you also to those of you who have said you will be prepared to help us with our work of running the Mission Hall, either on the Committee or with fund-raising. We will hope to find a way of getting people involved in the next few months, starting with a Volunteers’ Meeting in January (perhaps 18th).

These are interesting and worrying times. Early next year our electricity prices will go up by a large multiple, and without taking action we calculate we would have to put the Hall Hire rates up by about 80%. As a result, we are approaching Solar Panel installers to get prices for solar panelling to be fitted on as much of the south-facing roof as possible. Our calculations are that this will allow us to keep the rise in Hall Hire rates to around 25% - still significant but we believe our Hall will still be competitive compared with other halls locally.

Before the Solar Panels are fitted, however, we have contracted a firm to fit acoustic panelling to our ceiling - this should happen early in the New Year. As many of you have pointed out, the Hall’s acoustics are very bad, making communications difficult when there are numbers of people in the Hall. The acoustics are measured in what is called Reverberation Time, and these acoustic panels will reduce the Reverberation Time from around 3 seconds to about 1 second, which is ideal for a Hall of this type.

We are in the very fortunate position, significantly as a result of a recent bequest by a Rev William Kelly, to have money in the bank to pay for these improvements, but further fund raising will be important if we are to tackle other ideas that you have raised. We’re grateful to one villager for asking us to focus on “events that raise funds” rather than ”fund-raising events”, so we will try to make sure that FUN comes before FUNDS in our priorities.

I hope you can see we are already working busily on your behalves, and your responses to the previous Newsletter will give us lots to think about. To take this all forwards, we are planning

so that we can talk through the results of our Survey, and jointly discuss the way forward. We hope to see as many as possible of you there, so that the energy and enthusiasm you have all shown does not go to waste.

See you there!