Great News!! - St Wilfrid's Church, Halton

Great News has been released today about St Wilfrid's Church, Halton, Leeds. It has been awarded the largest grant nationally by the joint English Heritage and Heritage Lottery Fund Repair Grants for Places of Worship Scheme:

Yorkshire Post Article

The church has been granted nearly £500,000 towards a repair scheme for the roof, which will cost over £650,000.

You can find out more about St Wilfrid's Church at:

St Wilfrid's Church Website

Exemplar of the Month-ish: St George's Church, Leeds

I've now been writing this blog for a couple of months and this is the first I've presented an example of good practice, so I've changed the title accordingly.
My first exemplar is St George's church right at the centre of the city of Leeds. St George's have been able to marry primary service delivery (St George's Crypt - who have helped the homeless and needy for 80 years this year) without compromising the mission of the church. They are very clear about their vision for their church and they use their resources really well to help them achieve that vision.

Here's their website:

www.stgeorgesleeds.org.uk/

I really like their site. It's very well designed and shows that they're doing really interesting things as well as making sure it has the important fundraising stuff like having a donate here page and having links to the St George's centre, where they hire out function rooms. Importantly they also link up everything they do with videos on youtube, photos on flickr and networking on facebook and twitter. This way they can reach a greater audience and if someone clicks on one site their brought back to the website. It's a really good example of how all the activities the church do are linked virtually. 

Shaping the Future - Heritage Lottery Fund Consultation

The Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) have just started a consultation about the way they spend their money after 2013. Why does this matter? The joint scheme between the HLF and English Heritage called the Repair Grants for Places of Worship Scheme is currently due to run until 2013 and after that the future of the scheme will partly be decided by the consultation. The consultation is the really big opportunity to have your say about how great the repair grants for places of worship scheme is, how important it is to protect our religious heritage and how hard times are for getting money to repair our church heritage. The repair grants scheme is one of the only large funding sources for high level repairs so it’s incredibly important that it remains in place after 2013. You can fill in the consultation online at Heritage Lottery Fund Consultation.