CODDENHAM-PARISH.UK

The CCRG is a collaboration between the Community Shop, Coddenham Centre, St Mary’s Church/PCC, the Day Foundation and the Gardemau Trusts. The Country Club and History Club are associate members. It has been a fruitful relationship, and both CCRG as a group and its constituent organisations have won numerous awards, both local and national, over the last two years. In March this year, we were pleased to welcome back Coddenham Parish Council to the Group.

From co-ordinating and mutually supporting the activities of its members in helping the village cope with the pandemic, the group has, pleasingly, evolved into a forum where its members and their stakeholders can discuss and plan events for better times.

Following last years Jubilee celebrations and this year’s Coronation work is continuing on a Coddenham Community Plan, started last year, which with residents, will start to map out a vision for the future. More details are now on this home pages. Press the ‘Shape the Future’ button!

A summary of some of CCRG activities since March 2020 can be found here (MS.Docx),  but here are a few highlights from the last 12 months:

• Lord Lieutenant’s Award for Outstanding Community Service (shop)
• Re-launch of Baby and Toddler Group (Church, Coddenham Centre, Gardemau)
• Grants for educational purposes and to help struggling families (Gardemau)
• Runner-up, National Business Awards for Localisation (shop)
• Carbon Charter, tree/hedge planting, car chargers for Coddenham, switch to renewable energy and runners-up in Greener Suffolk Awards (Coddenham Centre).
• Funding for various community causes (Day Foundation)
• Commencement of the digitisation of Coddenham history (History Club). 
• Community Centre of the Year and Most Active Community Awards (Coddenham Centre)
• 500^th post on Community Website (All)

The Coddenham Community Response Group.

Making progress on all the big issues needs support and co-operation from bodies such as Mid Suffolk District Council and the County Council, and initial contact with them has been positive. We’re particularly grateful for the help we have had from District Councillors John Whitehead (now a Coddenham resident!) and Dave Penny (who also lives locally, in Hemingstone) and our County Councillor, Matt Hicks.

As you would expect, achieving real, visible improvements in some of the working group areas, eg housing, will take time, but each group has been asked to identify some ‘quick wins’ so residents can see some progress in the coming months. We appreciate that communication is very important and that people get their information in different ways. We are using the community and Parish Council websites, the Ten Village News, email circulation, Facebook and posters and flyers. Big issues may also require the occasional public meeting. As the Parish Council is leading on the Plan with the support of the CCRG, it regularly features on the agenda of PC meetings, which everyone is encouraged to attend. We must at this point pay tribute to everyone who has done an immense amount of work over the last two years on both the Survey and the Plan itself. The drive and expertise have been invaluable.

We must also mention the awful flooding experienced in Coddenham and elsewhere in October. As a parish, we suffered less than many – this time – but accelerating climate change makes such events ever more likely. Luckily, the new Parish Council recently decided that, for the first time in a number of years, it should have an Emergency Plan for the parish and an Emergency Planning Officer. Led by the Parish Council and The Coddenham Centre, CCRG members are working on an Emergency Response Plan, setting out the risks we are most likely to face in the coming years and how we will respond to them. This is being done in collaboration with both District and County Councils. For example, The Coddenham Centre has now been designated by MSDC as an Emergency Reception Centre and, had the need arisen (fortunately, it didn’t, but we came very close), it could have been used during the floods to temporarily house those made homeless. Let’s hope we never have to use it.

The Community Shop continued to play a key community role, despite a struggle for volunteers, celebrating a 100 years of Heritage with Roy & Anne Gudgin and the support of the History Club; the Country Club started to review its future strategy, the Coddenham Centre hosted the Coronation celebrations and made further enormous strides with renewable energy and contribution to Coddenham’s ‘Most Active Community Award’ for 2023, the Day Foundation and Gardemau Trusts continued to provide tireless collaboration and support while St Mary’s Church prepared for a new appeal for its wonderful Grade 1 building.

It’s important to point out that CCRG is only an informal group, a collaborative forum of all the village organisations. Its members are all volunteers, nominated by their respective bodies, and its work is the sum of the efforts of those bodies. Member groups all have their own priorities and constraints but, where it makes sense to work together, CCRG is the mechanism by which we do so. The awards won by members, by Coddenham and by CCRG itself over the last three years, would suggest that the system works, and that others think so too!

No doubt the coming months will present more challenges, whether from climate change, economic difficulties or global instability, but there’s much to look forward to: summer 2024 sees the return of Open Gardens and Scarecrows and possibly the Fete, our new revamped Nature Trail will be open and it’s the 80^th anniversary of D Day!

The Coddenham Community Response Group.