The Friends of Burton Bradstock Library

The Friends of Burton Bradstock Library is an association that has been formed in response to the need of the Dorset County Council to make savings in the budget of the Council Public Library Service. The Council has decided to achieve these savings by reducing the opening times of all the county libraries to a set of ‘core hours’. Thus the opening hours of the Burton Bradstock library will be reduced from 10 hours per week to 6 hours a week some time in September 2008. To try to minimise the impact of these reductions the Dorset County Council have agreed to allow local community volunteers to make up the lost hours by operating the local library service when the professional library staff are no longer available. Thus in Burton Bradstock the volunteers will operate the service for 4 hours per week. The Dorset County Council have agreed to provide training for the volunteers and to work closely with them to maintain (and possibly) expand the service.

At the same time as these changes were taking place, the library buildings of a number of rural libraries were offered by the Dorset County Council to their local Parish Councils on a 99 year lease at a peppercorn rent. In return the Parish Council were required to take over the cost of running the building with the library service continuing in it, and to try to promote the use of the building for additional local community activities.

Since the library building in Burton Bradstock is in the centre of the village, this was an opportunity to establish the building as a community asset for the foreseeable future. The Parish Council felt that this offer is a benefit to the community and have entered into negotiations with the Dorset County Council to take over the building subject to due diligence investigations.

The Friends of Burton Bradstock Library (FBBL) has been formed with two objectives. One is to provide volunteers to maintain the library service at 10 hours opening time per week. The other is to manage the library building for the Parish Council and to raise funds to assist the Parish Council in paying for the running costs of the building. These cost are estimated to be £3000 per year subject to an 80% reduction in the business rate. It is proposed to obtain this reduction by forming the Friends of Burton Bradstock Library into a charity.

As a part of the fund raising, members of FBBL pay an annual subscription. The minimum membership subscription is currently £5, with Patrons (those who wish to give more) paying a minimum donation of £25. Members who pay income tax are strongly urged to donate under the Gift Aid scheme, which enables charities to claim an additional 28% tax return on subscriptions and donations at no additional cost to the donors!. (This will go down to 25% in 2011 as a result of the abolition of the 10% tax band).

Following the inaugural meeting of the FBBL on the 9th. of April we now have 39 Patrons and 121 standard members. One of the Patrons has made a very generous (and anonymous) donation of £1000, so we have got off to a flying start with subscriptions and donations of over £2700. This is very helpful since it gives us some time to plan a realistic and robust fund raising campaign.

Our immediate need is to establish the FBBL as a charity. This means we need a constitution and a set of rules, and we need to have a general meeting at which the members can vote to accept the constitution and rules. A copy of the constitution and rules is shown below, and hard copy versions are available in the Burton Bradstock Library from Tuesday morning the 6th. of May, and during normal library opening hours thereafter.

The general meeting to vote on the constitution and rules will be held on Thursday 15th. of May at 8 P.M. in the Village Hall. Please come if you can. Only members can vote at this meeting so please bring your membership card if you have received it before the meeting. If not, come to the meeting and it will be issued to you there.

If you have not already joined the FBBL please give it serious consideration. To obtain a membership application form click on form and download a copy. It can be returned (with a cheque!) via the collection boxes in the library or the Post Office, or by post to R.Hynds, Summer Hill, Shipton Lane, Burton Bradstock DT6 4NQ. Thank you.

Application Form
Constitution
Library Rules

More about the Library