Broughton InTouch February-March 2023

Broughton Astley Volunteer Group

InTouch and responding to our community’s needs

There was a lot of festive cheer within the BAVG groups who were very active in December.

The BAVG Craft group "Jingle Belles Crafters" were very busy making handmade crafts to decorate their tree at the St Mary’s Christmas Tree Festival. They should have been very proud of all the dedicated hours, it looked amazing.

The Monday morning coffee crew, who regularly meet at St Mary's church, enjoyed a festive lunch with some bingo to round off the afternoon. A big thanks to the White Horse in Broughton Astley for hosting such a large group and feeding and entertaining us all!

All three New Age Kurling Groups joined forces for a festive Kurling competition. Much fun and laughter was enjoyed on the evening, with

If you are interested in joining any of our BAVG groups, please feel free to get in touch! All the contact details are on the front page.

At the Monday morning coffee sessions at St Mary’s church we have occasional visitors and speakers.

In January PC Malc Roberts, one of the Neighbourhood officers for Broughton Astley attended a session to advise residents on safety tips. It was very informative and well received and he gave away a lot of useful gadgets. He is planning to return on a monthly basis to be available to offer help or assistance to the residents.

Happy New Year to all our clients, referrers, donors and supporters. Christmas 2022 has been our busiest in our history as we fed over 380 people in December and gave out nearly £3000 of Supermarket gift vouchers to our clients as a Christmas gift and a cost of living emergency bonus.

Clients who were Broughton Astley residents were also given additional vouchers to spend in local shops in the village through the generosity of Broughton Alive. Thank you all for making such a difference and for helping the most vulnerable in our communities to have some Christmas cheer.

A special thank you to all the team at Lutterworth Community Transport too for managing to deliver this huge volume of parcels in the Harborough district so efficiently; we are so very grateful to them for their unstinting hard work and support. They delivered 3.3 tonnes of food to clients in the Harborough district alone in December and a massive 18.9 tonnes in total since January!

Thank you to everyone who has generously donated to us in the past year. You have all made such a difference to people in our community. It may only be tins and packets but it provides hope to people and some much needed relief. Broughton Astley residents collected over 270 kg of food in December so thank you all.

Citizens Advice: 0300 3302 111

Local Area Coordinator ( Broughton Astley): John Barraclough - 07732 824556

Twitter: @LuttFoodBank

Facebook: Lutterworth and Villages Foodbank www.lutterworthvillages.foodbank.org.uk

If you are in need of support, please contact one of our referral agencies for advice and help.

The Broughton Bus

Broughton Astley Volunteer Group

InTouch and responding to our community’s needs

As we start 2023, it is good to report that volunteer driver numbers are still increasing and we expect to have another three ‘on board’ very soon. This will help us to spread the workload so that our range of services can be increased. These will be in addition to the regular shopping trips to Lutterworth, Hinckley and Broughton Aldi, which are very well supported. Please contact either of the numbers below for more details. We are also very pleased to help with the transport for the very popular B.A.V.G. coffee mornings.

We are now able to report that our fund raising efforts for a replacement bus have been greatly assisted, thanks to a £17k award secured by Neil Bannister, our County Councillor. We were able to demonstrate our ongoing commitment to provide a range of bus services for the local community for which a replacement bus was an essential need. Thanks again to Neil for his recognition of what we provide, and for making our ongoing fund raising task a lot easier!

It is worth repeating that a volunteer bus service is only as good as the team that runs it! Our current team continue to offer a first class service, but we do need one or two more people to help keep your bus running. If you feel able to assist in any way, please contact either of the numbers below.

Call 01455 283001 or 282966

A Happy New Year to you all from the 1st Broughton Scout group and a big thank you to everyone who donated to the Scout Santa Float – we raised a fantastic £3,000.

As we enter a new year, we have already seen our new scouts join the group and the squirrel scouts have expanded their capacity to 18. We have lots of young people on our waiting list and would love to open a second squirrels’ unit so if you have the time to spare on a Monday between 17.00 – 18.00 please get in contact.

2023 is set to be another exciting year for us as we embark on a number of adventures which include some of our Cubs and Scout going sailing for 3 days on 2 x 49ft Oyster yachts departing from Ipswich over Easter. Our groups will also be taking part in a county wide incident hike covering a 10k route with lots of challenges along the way. Alongside all the other great activities we do it promises to be a great year.

We are also looking to start work on a new scout hut designed to allow us to increase our capacity and offer to more young people in the village. This is an exciting time and we look forward to working with the community to come up with a design which allows us to give the best scouting experience.

As always if you are interested in scouting whether as a young person or an adult volunteer, please get in contact with Sparrowhawk at phil.burton@broughtonastleyscouts.org.uk

Happy New Year to all of our volunteers and customers.

Lutterworth Community Transport offer a Social Car Scheme in the Broughton Astley area where volunteers use their own cars to take people to appointments when they have difficulty in accessing other forms of transport. Whilst this service is not free, by using volunteers we keep the cost to a minimum and we also have the benefit of being a door to door service so it is ideal for those with reduced mobility.

With the recent increase in the cost of living we thought it would be a good time to remind people that those in receipt of certain benefits, including pension tax credits, can reclaim some or all of the cost that they have incurred when they use our service to attend hospital appointments. Full details of who can claim and how to go about it can be found at https://www.nhsbsa.nhs.uk/check-if-youre-eligible-help. If you have difficulty in accessing this information, please ring us on 01455 555571 Mon- Fri, 9-2pm and ask for Graeme.

December at St Mary's

Christmas at St. Mary’s was busy and we would like to extend our thanks to everyone from the community who supported the various events.

The Christmas tree Festival attracted schools, local businesses, the uniformed organisations and individuals and the themes for decorating the trees were imaginative and lead to lots of chatter. Congratulations to Hallbrook Primary School voted the favourite tree and to Andrea Peel for her specially commended tree.

The Volunteer Group, who meet regularly in Church on Monday Mornings, partied their way through December!

The Christingle service brought the village out in large number and thanks go to the team who organised and ran the service.

Now things are getting back to normal with the usual Sunday services taking place including Messy Church on the 3rd Sunday each month. Morning prayer takes place each Wednesday morning, closely followed by Teddy Bear Bunch for pre-school children and their parents. Many in the village have found The Community Market on the first Saturday each month and we are trying to attract different stalls where we can. The Open the Book team is busy rehearsing ready to take two new Bible Stories into our schools this term.

Now, as we turn our thoughts towards Easter, it is hoped to offer a soup lunch followed by a time of discussion and reflection, on Wednesday lunchtime during Lent. More details will follow but it would be good to know if you are joining us as we wouldn’t want “The Magic Soup Pot” to run dry!

Blessing and Prayers from St Mary’s

Come along to our next two meetings!

TUESDAY 7th FEBRUARY

The history of the Leicester to Swannington Railway.

TUESDAY 7th MARCH

The Cold War with Jed Jaggard

Both meetings start at 7.30 in the Alan Talbott Room at the Village Hall, with the March talk following the AGM.

Follow BAHS on our FACEBOOK page “Broughton Astley Heritage Society”

Enderby & District Young Farmers Club

Enderby and District Young Farmers Club would like to thank everyone who booked to have their Christmas trees collected this year.

The members spent Saturday 7th and Sunday 8th January 2023 collecting real Christmas trees from homes in Broughton Astley, Dunton Bassett, Ashby Magna, Leire, Frolesworth, Lutterworth, Gilmorton, Walton, Cosby, Littlethorpe, Narborough, Enderby, Kirby Muxloe, Earl Shilton, Sapcote, Stoney Stanton, Hinckley, Barwell, Burbage and many more all in the name of charity!

The trees were then chipped and sent to be used as animal bedding. With your help we have raised approximately £2000! This money will be spilt between 2 charities, Enderby YFC and Matthew Needhams Treasure Chest. Please look out for our posters next year.

If you'd like to join or find out more about Enderby YFC please visit our website www.enderbyyfc.co.uk

Some exciting news for Girlguiding Broughton Astley

Girlguiding Broughton Astley currently has 1 Rainbow group, 2 Brownie groups, 1 Guide group and 1 Ranger group with 89 young members and 21 young leaders and leaders. We also have 94 young girls on our waiting list of all ages.

We have a new Guide group opening soon! If you have a daughter aged 9 and over and you would like to place her on the waiting list please email lutterworthgirlguiding@gmail.com

We also have spaces at our Ranger unit which is for our older members aged 14-18. Please also email lutterworthgirlguiding@gmail.com.

Come and join our volunteer team! If you are interested, we have lots of roles for you, this could be helping in the background with admin or attending meetings and running activities.

With the rising costs of fuel, food and other items, many are feeling the pinch and taking what actions they can. One common step has been to turn the heating down to help keep the bills lower. While this helps with the cost it doesn’t help with the cold. To help with this we want to make our building available for use as a warm space.

You can come and get warm while we are open for the Elms Café or Renew but specificality we will be opening up on a Friday, 1.30-5.30pm as Warm Space. There you can enjoy free refreshments, charge your phone, use Wi-Fi, sit with your kids while they do their homework or play games. Each week there will be a variety of optional activities and always someone to chat with, all in a warm and welcoming space.

Everyone is welcome.

One of our members suggested that it would be very helpful to have a demonstration of a defibrillator, given that we have several located around our village and Phil Burton, Broughton Astley Group Scout Leader, volunteered to do just that. He brought along a resuscitation mannequin and started by showing us how to check for breathing, open the airway and start cardio-pulmonary resuscitation (CPR). Several members had a go and it is very hard work! Then on to running through the operation of the defibrillator - the machine does talk you through exactly what to do, but it was really good to have this demonstrated. We are very grateful to Phil for his expertise.

We were delighted to take part in the St Mary’s Church Christmas Tree Festival and our crafting group made some beautiful decorations from materials that would normally be thrown away or recycled to highlight the new 3Rs of ‘Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.’ The results were very attractive.

Our members enjoyed our Christmas party when the committee served savoury and sweet refreshments accompanied by a glass of wine or St Clement’s mocktail and ‘The After Eight Quartet’ provided an entertaining selection of popular and seasonal songs, which went down very well.

We start the 2023 season with our usual varied selection of guest speakers including “Wet on Wet” painting, an introduction to British Sign Language and South American music. Visitors are always welcome at our monthly meetings.

Call 01455 282118 for more information.

BROUGHTON ASTLEY

PARISH COUNCIL

New Playground Equipment at Frolesworth Road Recreation Ground

Broughton Astley Parish Council are pleased to announce that a new piece of Multi-play equipment at Frolesworth Road Recreation Ground was installed in December 2022. This is the one chosen by children and adults surveyed at the park during the summer months and has replaced the oldest piece of equipment in the play area.

The Recreation Ground will continue to be opened at 6:30am and closed at 4:30pm until 31 March 2023 when the hours will be extended to 9.30pm.

Parish Office Opening Times

Our Parish Office, located at Broughton Astley Village Hall is open from 9.00am – 1.00pm Mon, Tues, Thurs and Friday (closed on a Wednesday). Please telephone us on 01455 285655 if you are interested in putting your name down on our waiting list for an Allotment, and please email: bookings@broughton-astley.gov.uk should you wish to enquire about booking a party. We have a range of rooms to cater for all types of party bookings:

Main Kitchen

Broughton Hall

ASTLEY

PARISH COUNCIL

For more information regarding room capacity, fees and charges please visit our website and click on Halls for Hire or follow this link: https://www.broughton-astley.gov.uk/halls-for -hire1.html

You will also find information about a wide range of activities that run from our Village Hall.

The Cottage

Alan Talbott Room