Lynemouth Resource Centre

Lynemouth is a former mining village at the Southern end of Northumberland rural coalfield. With the decline in mining, it suffers from a high level of unemployment and economic decline.

Lynemouth Community Trust was set up in December 1998 to assist with the regeneration of the village. An initial appraisal identified that the major problem for the village was lack of nearby employment and community activities. Local training facilities were needed to improve the skill base of the village residents.

In 1999 the Trust was able to secure funding to purchase and refurbish the current building for use as a resource Centre. The centre opened in September 2000 and each year sees the growth and consolidation of a wide range of community based activities.  They know have 4 full time paid staff, 6 part time and 30 volunteers.

The centre provides training opportunities and employment guidance mainly for young adults and other unemployed people of the village.  With the use of their website they are able to supply information not only on the educational uses of technology but also local community activities such as flower arranging, links to counselling services for mental health sufferers and carers.  They have a café offering collection of elderly or house bound residents thus enabling all of the community to have a sense of inclusion.

An important feature is the Information Technology suite, which provides computer and Internet access. Three skilled facilitators support users. They currently have 12 training computers and the equipment purchased was new at the time. 

ICT is fundamentally important to their project enabling them to offer such development courses such as Financial Management, Office Skills, and Invoicing etc. They are also currently working on a project called Seltbinoo which will establish itself as an online retail service provider for enterprises that would benefit from outsourcing the sale of their goods.  The primary medium for online sales will be EBay where Seltbinoo will be able to give worldwide exposure to goods in a low risk environment.  Additionally Seltbinoo will provide training courses to individuals on how to successfully sell on EBay in order to stimulate entrepreneurial activity.

Seltbinoo will operate from Lynemouth Resource Centre with a striking online presence.

The ICT Hub was very informative when Lynemouth Community Trust initiated the start of Health & Safety courses for employers on COSHH and H&S in Health and social care etc.  They now have a separate Web site www.brighteyetraining.com.

The only negatives to using ICT for Lynemouth Community Trust, is the assumption that everyone is ICT fluent especially with regards to communicating via Email.

If more funding was made available the trust would certainly apply and at present are hoping to re-new their Learn Direct contract with extra funding this would enable the purchase of more training computers enabling them to reach more people and improve the employment and social inclusion of their community.  The one difficulty they experience is keeping up to date with the software that is available.  They hope that with some funding to create a mobile ICT Bus offering a range of courses.

For more information about Lynemouth Resource Centre visit www.lynemouth.org.uk