Fir Tree Community Association

Fir Tree Drive Tenants Association was formed 25 Years ago and survived for twenty years in some form or another until March 2002 when the Association became a constituted Group. More recently we have become a fully fledged Community Association.

The driving force behind the Community Association was to tackle a long standing problem with youth on the estate who were carrying out acts of vandalism and other nuisance behaviour such as graffiti. By uniting tenants and residents under one umbrella we could tackle the issues and have dialogue with our landlord using one voice.

The Association has a written constitution which gives all of its aims and objectives this once again is going through a transition period as we have started an application to get charitable status. A new constitution and business plan are being drawn up at present.

Committee meetings are held at least six times a year as well as our Annual General Meeting (AGM) which is sometimes held twice a year and is open to the public. At present Committee meetings can be attended by outside organisations either by invite or the outside organisations can ask to attend the meetings, which is the norm.

Our current committee comprises:

Glenn Price (Chairman)
Donna Clarkson (Secretary)
Heather Dix (Treasurer)
Marion Price (committee member) Diane Shepherd (committee member)
Lisa Cousins (committee member) Silena Andrews (committee member)
Louise Williams (committee member) Meryl Cullen (committee member)
Joanna Forrest (committee member) Kevin Landers (committee member)

We can be contacted at:
40 Fir Tree Drive
Quakers Yard
Treharris
Merthyr Tydfil
CF46 5AY

Telephone Number: 01443 410095
Email: glennpri@f2s.com or Doghead30@hotmail.com

Activities

The Association now holds youth nights 5 times a week, regular coffee mornings, police clinics, bingo, slimming club, healthy eating, Hafod housing clinics and other numerous community based activities.

The summer school holidays is our busiest time as we are open for the full six weeks of the summer holiday so that local children have a safe place to keep busy. In the last few years we have had groups in to work with us doing everything from simple art work to making mosaics, large scale carvings (owls, eagles and sheep), and totem poles, doing Street Theatre and Street Art, building bench planters with seats on either side and general arts and crafts.

Every year we hold Christmas Parties for younger children up to nine years of age and also one for the older children up to sixteen years of age. We also have Halloween parties every year.

Two years ago we held a carnival display band competition held with bands from all over England and Wales.

Funding

As you will appreciate our activities cost a lot of money which we have to find. Grants provide some, but not all, of the funding and Hafod help with a yearly grant plus other grants from time to time. Other monies are made through our own tuck shop, friend's bonus ball, jumble sales, donations and by any other legal means we can think of!

Fir Tree House

At present all of our meetings and activities take place in two Porta Cabins which we purchased with the help of a Coalfields Regeneration Trust Grant. We have now outgrown these Porta Cabins and so we have lodged a planning application to build a state of the art community resource which will be known as Fir Tree House. Through the Business in Community ProHelp programme, we worked with B3Burgess Architects to design the building which can be viewed below:

Set over two floors, the ground floor has a kitchen, Café, exhibition / public information point, large room for the youth club and a platform lift that will allow the less able amongst use to access the second floor.

The first floor has an office / IT suite, meeting / training room, Social Enterprise room and another kitchen.

We would like to take this opportunity to say a very big thank you to Nick Ruff, Kate Lloyd and the rest of the fantastic B3Burgess staff whose time, advice and expertise were truly invaluable and very much appreciated by all of us.

Links to other groups

The Association has links with several other groups in the local area. We have regular help and support from the local Police and we have a reciprocal arrangement with Communities First who assist with technical support when they are able to. The local Healthy Living project uses our facilities to give the children and adults cooking lessons, as does Home Start which helps young parents with children and parenting skills. We are also involved with Treharris Outreach Workers who are specialist youth workers that go out to the community to talk to and assist the youth of the area. Every effort is made to encourage young people to use our facilities instead of wandering the streets.

All of our volunteers have been on at least one training course and some have attended a number of courses. These include First Aid, Food Hygiene, Secretarial Duties, Chairing Duties, Risk Assessment, Desktop Publishing, and accountancy seminars covering VAT and Tax issues.