St Bernadette Club

St Bernadette Club are a small charity based in the east end of Newcastle.

They’ve been operating now for over 50 years and started as an out of school club offering support to children with learning difficulties. They soon expanded to include children with any sort of disability, whether physical or mental.

However, as their children matured into adults and support for disabled children improved, they realised that there was very little provision for adults with learning difficulties, so they changed the Club to support disabled adults.

They now have over 70 members, many more if you include all the volunteers, who regularly attend the Club.  On Club nights, the range of activities they offer is huge. They have a craft corner, disco music, boccia, football, a tuck shop, just about anything you can think of.

But their support doesn’t end there. They offer help to their members with understanding medication, with filling forms in, even with finding accommodation. Sadly, during the covid pandemic, their support even extended to helping members arrange funerals for family members.

So that’s them, but what about their website?  They had survived for many years without a website, so why on earth did they need one now?

Two reasons.

The first, as ever, was to do with funding.  St Bernadette is run entirely by volunteers with no paid staff at all, and their venue is provided free of charge by a local school.  They do some fundraising which pays for incidentals such as the weekly tea and coffee, but they do have one big expense, which is transport. None of their members can drive so they provide taxis to get everyone to and from the Club every week, and with the recent hikes in fuel prices the cost of doing this is huge – it’s now well over £10,000 a year.

Fundraising and donations alone can’t support that sort of regular outgoing, so they started to realise that they needed to look at applying for funding. And what’s the first thing funders look for? Yes, a website!

The second reason they wanted a website is because a lot of their members regularly use the web and they like nothing more than seeing photographs of themselves on the net. I can’t say I share their enthusiasm as I hate seeing myself in a photo, but that’s what they wanted so that’s what they got – a website full of photos of Club members, doing their stuff.  Have a look at the Activities page to see the kinds of things they get up to.

So my brief was to make the site friendly, welcoming and colourful. It also had to show what the Club does, its history and the impact it makes to its local community.

Has it been successful? Well I think so. The Club committee and volunteers certainly liked it. Unfortunately I can’t tell you what happened with the funders as I don’t have access to that kind of information, but I can tell you that the Club is still going strong after six years, even with the continued pressure on taxi prices.  And long may it continue!