There aren’t many clients I’d travel an hour across the region for first thing in the morning on icy roads, but the charity team at Brierfield Action in the Community (BAICOM) are the exception.

In case you don’t know where Brierfield is, it’s a small town in Lancashire so far up and across on the M65 that you wonder if you’ve missed the junction entirely as the landscape becomes increasingly more Yorkshire-like. I jest of course, but considering I live in the same county, it’s a long way!

Usually, after an hour on the road heading anywhere for work, I feel a little less energised than I would do going into a meeting that took say 10 minutes to get to, but the welcome I got when I arrived to meet the team at BAICOM absolutely re-energised me, and not only did I feel motivated to work, but I also felt completely at home.
Whilst this welcome was nearly all down to the wonderful team of staff and volunteers at the charity, a small part was certainly played by the attraction of BAICOM’s ‘home’ headquarters; a lovely little café in the centre of the town. As well as the café forming a fantastic hub for the majority of the organisation’s key projects for all walks of life from the community to engage with, it serves as the HQ for all meetings and meet-ups needed by the team in order to ensure that their projects – and their charity as a whole – can move forward. This, incidentally, is why I’d been invited along in the first place.

Like so many organisations that work in the community to change the lives of their residents for the better, so much time and energy is spent running those projects and caring for those participants that the people running them can forget – or simply not have time – to document all the good work that they’re doing. This is a huge disappointment, because it can mean that not everybody knows about the good work that’s happening in the first place. It’s also a problem if the organisation in question hopes to grow, because when applying for competitively fought for funding to develop and innovate, they need to produce written evidence, case studies and evaluations to show what they’ve done – and what they have the potential to go on to do.

I was instantly drawn to the amazing team of staff and volunteers as I was greeted by them for our meeting, and so I knew I could play a part in making sure that their good work was showcased across Brierfield and beyond! In the coming weeks, you can look at their brand new website, where Naheed, Zoya, Sallie and Tayeba will tell you more about who they are, what they do, and exactly why they are an invaluable resource for people young and old living in Brierfield.

I started my working day with a warm welcome and a hot drink, and ended it with the team’s insistence that I stay for lunch before heading back out into the cold and onto the M65. If this is how Brierfield Action in the Community treat people who live on the other side of the county, I can only imagine how much they must do for the people who live in their hometown.