SCE Volunteering Day at The Ardagh Community Trust
As part of Skeletal Consulting Engineers’ ongoing commitment to corporate social responsibility, our team recently spent the day volunteering at The Ardagh Community Trust in North Bristol.
The Ardagh is a much-loved community hub located on Horfield Common in North Bristol. Originally built as a pavilion and sports facility, the site had fallen into decline over a number of decades before local residents came together to help secure its future. In 2019, Ardagh Community Trust successfully took on the site through a Community Asset Transfer lease from Bristol City Council, allowing the charity to regenerate and manage the facilities for community use.
Today, the Trust provides a wide range of community facilities and activities, including gardens, sports spaces, a café, a plant nursery and wellbeing initiatives, all run with the support of staff, volunteers and local partnerships.
A key focus of our volunteering day was helping the Trust move forward with one of its long-standing sustainability ambitions: reducing reliance on mains water through improved rainwater harvesting and storage.
Our team installed new guttering and IBC water storage tanks to collect and store rainwater for use across the site, particularly to support the plant nursery and wider gardening activities. This had been on the Trust’s to-do list for some time, so it was great to help deliver a practical improvement with long-term environmental benefits.
Alongside this, the team supported a wide range of general maintenance and improvement works across the site, including clearing blocked gutters and flat roofs, rebuilding and strengthening donated plant tables, repairing and rehanging a gate to improve safety in the children’s area, relocating storage structures, clearing waste, and general weeding and tidying works.
It was a hands-on day with plenty to get through, but hugely rewarding to support an organisation doing valuable work within the local community.
Following the volunteering day, Sally from The Ardagh said:
“Please pass on our huge thanks to your team for Friday’s utterly amazing day. You were such a positive and motivated group, it was an absolute pleasure to have you on site. Thanks for going above and beyond our expectations and ticking off so many tasks on our never ending to-do list.”
Chrissie, CEO of The Ardagh Community Trust, added:
“Thank you for all your work on Friday; it is truly appreciated. Your team’s enthusiasm and just cracking on through Sally’s seemingly bottomless list of tasks was absolutely fantastic to behold!”
A huge thank you to The Ardagh team for having us!
We’re proud to have contributed, in a small way, to an organisation creating long-term social, environmental and wellbeing benefits for the local community.
