Britain's 'most community-minded village'

National World - Viral Videos

Both young and older residents work hard to keep the village, near Burnley, running smoothly, with volunteers getting discounts in the shops, garden centre and pub.

Transcript

00:00I'm Mike and I'm the post office man. They all call me the postie. And I've been doing

00:10this for about four years now at Troden. This is one of my very favourite outreaches because

00:15the people are all very nice. It's marvellous what the volunteers have done and what everybody

00:20to set this up and keep the village alive.

00:28I'm Jamie Hargraves. I'm the manager of the Troden Arms. So the pub's owned by the community.

00:35I believe there's 425 shareholders all around that figure. Myself and my wife, we lease it

00:42from them and we have been doing so since January 2023. It's been going swimmingly and it's been

00:52going great ever since we took it on. We always try to make sure we've got enough choice and

00:57availability for anybody that wants to come in, whether it's gluten free, which is a big thing,

01:03and alcoholic beer. We've got a range of 18 different draft products at any one time.

01:09So the pub was the final piece of the puzzle for the community. They bought it last after securing

01:16the community centre, the shop, the library, the post office, and all that is solely run

01:22by over 120 volunteers. The pub itself has six volunteers.

01:30My name's Molly Waltherson. I'm the volunteer coordinator here at Troden Forest Community

01:35Centre, Library and Shop. So I work 25 hours and I'm one of the only people who is employed.

01:43Everybody else in the organisation are volunteers. They give up their time for free. We've got the

01:49community centre, which is a building that has events on. It has a bar, so people can come and

01:56hire the centre for birthdays and weddings. We've got a license for weddings and it's used by so

02:02many different community groups and it's run by a board of trustees or volunteers. It takes a lot

02:08of people to keep our assets running, volunteering. We've got about 150 people who volunteer in some

02:16capacity or other to keep everything going. I mean, the shop itself needs 68 different people

02:22to do two hours a week just to keep the shop open. That's just serving customers in the shop

02:27and keeping the shelves filled. Behind the scenes, obviously, there's so many more hours that go on

02:32in terms of accounting, buying, driving, office. It's just an endless list and people give up their

02:40time for that, 150 of us all together.

02:51you

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