New Heanor Community Centre Succeeds in Former Church Site

Converting the former Methodist Church on Market Street, Infinite Wellbeing’s new location features a community cafe, rooms for hire, countless events, and something special… a community feeling.

Infinite Wellbeing is not a new organisation. It has been providing wellbeing programmes and enrichment activities, especially for children and young people, since being formed in 2020. Despite this though, it never possessed a permanent space - relying on hired spaces and sessions in schools.

However, in early-2023, they began to search for bigger premises, and the Directors agreed to a 5-year lease on the building with the owners of the former Heanor Methodist Church.

One of the people behind Infinite Wellbeing, Rebecca Patrick, allowed herself to be interviewed about the opening, her work-life balance, and more. What I found to be most striking was the immense voluntary commitment she has made to ensure the centre is successful.

What’s a brief introduction of yourself?

I'm Rebecca Patrick. I'm the Managing Director at Infinite Wellbeing Community Centre and Infinite Wellbeing Community Interest Company.

Infinite Wellbeing is a Community Interest Company that was launched almost three years ago. We do holiday clubs. We've got a wellbeing programme that's CPD accredited, and we [now] do a lot more since July when we opened the Community Centre.

Previously I have worked a lot in education. I've worked for the NHS as a behaviour specialist, nursery nurse, and worked as a special needs teaching assistant and a teaching assistant for a long time.

How did you come across the building?

We just got to the point at Easter where we'd outgrown the space we used for the holiday club and it just got really noisy and packed, which is amazing to think how many more people come to the holiday clubs now than when we first started them.

We finished the [2023] Easter Holiday club and just I just said we need a bigger premises. We need a venue that is fit for purpose. And so we started looking and stumbled across this lovely place and spoke to the owners, who agreed to a 5 year lease on it for us to turn it into a community centre.

What is your day-to-day life like?

I have an early start getting all the machines ready, baking the cakes, and just general setting up of the cafe before we open and we'll open the doors from 9 and at that point the cafe is open, we serve drinks and breakfast from 9:00 till 11:30.

Then we swap to a lunchtime menu. Also from 9:00 the role play centre opens so we get lots of people in from the school run. Most mornings at 9:30, we run a fun and fit session, which is a relaxed fitness class for parents and carers to attend while the children are busy playing in the role play centre, that's all included in the entry price to the role play, so there's no additional cost.

At 10:30 we have either a rhyme time or a messy play session, and then we have the alternate session at 12:30 on every day.

We have meetings in, we have community events on. We have Tai Chi during the week as well. So we've got seated Tai Chi twice a week and we've got standing sessions going on as well.

There's lots of networking, lots of people to chat to - and a real good feeling of community spirit, which is fabulous.

How is your work-life balance?

There isn't one at the minute. We're both working very hard. We're. We're both working very long hours.

I'm sure it will change at some point. We've just managed to work it out so that only one of us works a weekend. So we work our turn at weekends between myself and Cheryl.

Cheryl and myself have worked out that we work about 120 hours a week each, and at the minute it is voluntary because we’re a community interest company.

We’re a nonprofit, so at the minute we need to make sure that there’s enough money to pay the bills and pay our amazing staff.

Ben Mellor

Featured image taken by Rebecca Patrick, rights provided to be used in this article.

In article image one taken by Rebecca Patrick, rights provided to be used in this article. Image has been edited by Ben Mellor.

In article audio recorded by Ben Mellor.