ABERGORKI COMMUNITY HALL

Community Halls Overview.                                             

The Abergorki Community hall is a three-story landmark building at Treorchy and also the largest charitable organization in the Rhondda valleys, it was built with the famous miners’ penny and then given to the Community after completion in 1915, for 105 years the hall has served the Community of Treorchy and beyond.

Fortunately these types of buildings were built in a more giving time by people that had nothing themselves, (Minors) but unfortunately over the years many of them have either been knocked down or bought by private developers and they have nearly all disappeared, when they have all gone we will have lost our history and heritage.

The Abergorki Community halls aim is to provide a facility that helps everyone no matter what disability, nationality or income.

Each year the trustees try to carry out a number of improvements to our hall, this is usually the most important works, or anything to do with the health and safety aspect of the building.

Unfortunately over many years of being a grass roots charity we have found that our organization is often overlooked or ignored because of the inexperience of our non-paid volunteers in completing complex application forms, we also do not have a high profile like other large charitable organizations with advertising budgets, paid Executives and staff who have expertise in applying for grants and donations.

Our Community halls only source of permanent income comes from rent and charitable donations from the group’s that use our facilities, this is somewhere in the region of £14,000 per year.

At present we support ten groups and 750 people with over 300 of them being children from our area and beyond, we also have a large number of disabled people using the hall.

These groups consist of an Art’s society, five martial-arts groups,

Gymnasium, chamber of trade, environmental group, music lessons and our locale rugby teams.

The trustees have also recently started allowing people with community service to carry out their work at our hall, there by helping the probation service with placements and also showing offenders the value of community participation.

All this is done with a building that has been neglected for a number of years due to a shortage of grants and our inability to raise funds from a deprived area.

We have also tried to acquire grants from the Welsh Assembly on a number of occasions over the years but sadly they seem to have other politically correct priorities in more affluent areas.

The trustees of our community hall are struggling to maintain the building and keep these classes running and fully equipped, as you will appreciate it is extremely difficult to achieve this task with what little funds are usually left after running costs.

Our goals and survival have become a lot harder over the last few years due to the Council cutting back on grants and closing down facilities in our area such as youth centres, libraries and sporting facilities, this has meant that our organization has been inundated with requests from groups looking for somewhere to use, unfortunately we are limited by our buildings very poor condition to help everyone.

The trustees would like to state that our organization is struggling to survive in today's climate not because we are losing membership but completely the opposite membership is growing, all our groups are keen to help to maintain our community hall but the dilemma is the funding to proceed and keep this facility open for future generations.

The valleys have always been deprived even when our country was doing well but the last few years of severe cuts have left our communities with nothing except an extremely large old Charitable Community hall that needs lots of work.

Any help at all would be very gratefully received, if any further information is needed please do not hesitate to contact us, or you may wish to visit the Abergorki Community hall personally.

Yours Sincerely

                         Halls Trustees.

You may find of help on YOU-TUBE a 15 minute documentary of our Community hall, It was made for a failed lottery bid over 11 years ago and will help show our predicament, the hall was on the verge of closure at that time but we have gradually improved the Hall over the years with a lot of hard work and hardly any funds. Just type - ABERGORKI HALL