We understand the financial impact that Covid-19 has had on our communities and want to do whatever we can to ease the financial burden of worthwhile local organisations that have been impacted by the pandemic.  Therefore, we were delighted to be able to support our Bristol HQ neighbours, the Big Issue, through their ‘Big Community’ initiative.

Our sponsorship has helped sustain and develop alternative means of service provision for their vendors, whose income has been drastically affected by national lockdown measures. 

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We've invested £15,000 in South Bristol Sports Centre to create six new state of the art football pitches. Our investment helped secure a vital and much-used community resource, benefiting its local area, the rest of Bristol and the wider region. 

It's part of a total package of investment of c£1m, raised with the help of Bristol & Bath Regional Capital CIC, to help the centre become a more sustainable social enterprise. We were delighted to play a part in helping support our local community and our members by investing in such a worthwhile venture.

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We supported Bristol Energy Cooperative to become one of the UK’s largest generators of community energy by investing in their solar bond offer in 2016, doing our bit to support renewables and keeping more money circulating within our local economy. 

In 2018, solar panels were installed on our offices in Upper York Street, and since then we have saved around 2,200 kg CO2 emissions, which is the equivalent of planting ten trees, having generated 7.76mWh of our own power in 2018/19.

In 2019, we started offering loans to our members to enable them to fit solar panels to their own houses. 

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We work with Bristol City Council, Bath & North East Somerset Council, and Shelter to help support some of the most vulnerable in our communities.

We have helped 245 people who were at risk of homelessness by offering them loans to cover a deposit and the first month’s rent for a home in the private rental sector; After the loans are issued, in many cases the monthly rent payments come via BCU; our involvement ensures prompt payment, which benefits both tenants and landlords.

We have supported a further 73 families through the Vulnerable People’s Resettlement Scheme, a Home Office funded initiative to resettle vulnerable people from across the Middle East and Africa. We also continue to help administer a rent guarantee scheme, with the aim of keeping people housed, even when they are in difficult circumstances; to date, 160 people have been supported in this way.

 

For several years, we’ve  teamed up with ‘England Illegal Money Lending Team’, to encourage residents in Bristol and Bath to sign up to a credit union account.

As part of the incentive, anyone opening a credit union account received £10 into their account after 3 months of saving. The money used to fund this was sourced from convicted loan sharks, via the Proceeds of Crime Act. 

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