HBCA Celebrating 10 / 125 Years: The Queens Award
As part of our celebrations, we’re looking back to 2017 when we were humbled to receive The Queen’s Award for Voluntary Service, the highest award given to volunteer groups across the UK that provide a specific and direct benefit to their local communities.
We were nominated in recognition for our role as a community anchor organization, demonstrating what people can do when they pull together.
HBCA was established through community and volunteer endeavour. This is something we have retained over the years and throughout the organisation’s various partnerships and projects. From our leadership (comprised of a volunteer Board of Trustees), to volunteers in the community who bring a wide diversity of activities and events to the building and our own fabulous Volunteer Coordinator and volunteers who provide reception duties, welcome the public, signpost local services, and frankly, a whole lot more besides… Between them all, we are very lucky indeed!
A poignant example of how the community pulled together and galvanized volunteer effort at the Town Hall was during the floods on Boxing Day 2015. Hebden Bridge experienced its worst flooding in over 50 years with hundreds of houses up and down the Valley being affected, alongside several sub-stations which left hundreds of people living without power or lighting for several days.
People from across the area spontaneously gathered at the Town Hall as a meeting place both offering and looking for help. So, with planning and the pooling of volunteer skills and knowledge, working side by side with other responders including the Council, emergency services, and local responders, the Town Hall organically evolved into a volunteer hub, providing flood relief by linking up hundreds of volunteers - locally and nationally to bring assistance to those most in need.
This spontaneous collective community effort epitomises everything HBCA set out to achieve at its inception - acting as a creative connector and conduit, forming links and creating partnerships to support a diverse range of local activity. Having demonstrated to ourselves and to others that by working together we could do it we are the Town’s official Flood Hub: paying further testament to the Charity’s identity and purpose - as a place of and for volunteer action.
While we are extremely proud to have received the Queen’s Award for Voluntary Service as an organisation, there are so many people who contributed to our success and helped us get there. In the good times and the more challenging. We therefore hold the award in trust for our community, and feel it is shared with each and every one of you.