Memberships and Community Shares – This could be HUGE.

Apart from filling the pool with glowsticks and getting stuck into a few Hop Ins, one of the key issues we brought up at our fundraiser last week was the issue of finding the money to build the pool.

Now, for anyone who’s stuck with us since day one, you’ll already know that funding the pool will require a cocktail of cash sources, and we’re confident we can secure the following conservative amounts from:

• Trusts and Grants – Such as the Coastal Revival Fund: £1.8m, and Heritage Lottery: £400k
• Enabling Development – At least £1m
• Local Fundraising – Around £200k from sponsored activities and other local fundraising events
• Business Contributions – Around £500k from larger businesses

However, do the maths, and that still leaves us a little short of our overall total of the £5-5.5 million we need.

Which means we need to find the final piece of our fundraising puzzle – and we’re confident that we’ve done just that.

Community Shares

Bear with us, because this is exciting stuff. Firstly, you can read more about community shares at http://communityshares.org.uk/, but here’s one of the key parts from that website:

“All enterprises need risk capital to start, to grow, and to be sustainable. This risk finance has to come from somewhere, and community shares enables this investment to come from the very community which an enterprise intends to benefit. These community shareholders invest in local enterprises to provide goods and services to meet local needs and only expect a fair and modest return on their investment.”

Essentially, Community Shares are perfect for this project. With a minimum investment of £200 and a max of £20k, they’d allow anyone to share ownership of the pool and to have a say in its future direction. What’s more, they currently offer a 30% tax refund, and the full value of any shares purchased is withdrawable after 3 years.

Most importantly, they come with the feelgood factor of being able to make a genuine social investment – in other words, you’ll be directly responsible for getting this pool down on Longsands.

We’ll not go into too much detail, but we will say that we think this is going to be HUGE. We’ve got a little bit of work to do before we can think about launching the scheme, but feel free to read more on what Community Shares mean via that link above.

Oh, and if you’ve got any doubts about any of this, we’ll share this little story with you: in February 2015, FC United, a Northern Premier League Football club in Manchester announced the results of their Community Shares offer. They originally hoped to raise £750,000 when shares were first issued in 2010, but due to their popularity they ended up with £2m from just 1,522 shareholders.

We’ve already got almost 13k supporters – and if that doesn’t get you excited, we don’t know what will.

However…

Before we can launch our Community Shares offer, we first need to look into launching a Membership programme – because the rules say we can only sell shares to Members.

So, we’ve put together a tentative proposal for members, that will include:

• Voting rights – members get to vote on the bigger decisions affecting the project
• Updates and reports – members will receive regular updates on the project’s progress
• Discounts and other benefits – we’re currently working with a number of local businesses (in Tynemouth and nearby) who would be willing to provide incentives to card holding members (think free starters, your 5th coffee free, invites to exclusive events, etc, etc)

In return, we’d need to charge a £10 annual fee to cover administration, etc, but the rewards would definitely be worth it.

What’s next?

Right, the first step is for us to gauge interest in all of this. Virtually everyone who attended our fundraiser completed a paper form and told us they were well up for it, so we’re already off to a flying start. We now have an online version at http://getinvolved.tynemouthoutdoorpool.com for anyone who couldn’t make it, or who lives away from Tynemouth to have their say too.

You can use this form to tell us if you’d be interested in joining as a member, whether you’d be interested in buying community shares, whether you can help with fundraising activities, and whether your business (if you have one!) might be able to help, too.

It’s really important that fill it in, and it’s also important that you share the link – http://getinvolved.tynemouthoutdoorpool.com – with anyone you know who might be interested too.

We can’t be any clearer when we say that this is your chance to be the future of Tynemouth Outdoor Pool.

Get involved now!