First some great news
OCLT is thrilled to announce we have just won funding of £304K from Vale of White Horse District DC. Read more here. This means we can start building the Dean Court homes.
As some of you will know this is our first project and is for 8 permanently affordable homes for local people in housing need. Future residents will come from people in Vale’s Register of housing need. People may be in housing need for a variety of reasons, they might literally be homeless or they might have precarious, overcrowded or substandard accommodation.
OCLT homes will be built to be highly energy efficient and will be for rent at affordable rents. Because we are a CLT the homes can never be sold: they will be there for ever, for affordable rent for local people in housing need. OCLT hopes to start on site later this year and have the first residents move in some time in 2022.
How we got here
Lots of people have helped get the project this far. The late Tony Crofts, who we all remember with his wonderful energy and verve, found the Dean Court site. Since then, the board of OCLT, all volunteers, have worked tirelessly to make it happen. We estimate that the time contribution of the Board every year is upwards of 2000 hours.
More recently in 2019, we were helped with a large and generous donation from two benefactors to fund the work that took the Dean Court site successfully through planning. It also enabled us to undertake the detailed development appraisal which underpins the funding requirements of the project. We also had a development grant from Homes England’s Community Housing Fund. We are grateful to John Bloxsom for his outstanding leadership of this work and to the two donors who made it possible.
In 2020, we had more success with a grant from the Cohesive Communities Fund. This helped us to do more work towards our long term vision. We grew the membership by 50%. And in partnership with Oxford City Council and local architects Transition by Design we also secured further funding to develop garage sites with Oxford City Council. Read more about it here. Big thanks to Alice Hemming who lead all of this work and did lots of other things as well. We will miss her capable hands now that she has moved on. We’ve also had fantastic support from our accountants Critchleys who until very recently did our books every year pro bono. Several other local suppliers have also given us discounts on printing, web design and administrative costs.
How you can help
You can become a member of OCLT for just £1. As a member you will receive regular updates about our work and have the chance to influence the future work of OCLT through attending AGMs and voting on major decisions. You’ll also be invited to other events for example celebratory events when we start on site. You’ll also have the chance to look at an comment on our plans before they’re finalised.
To get to the next stage we also aim to raise a total of £12,000 to take us to March 2022. This is simply to cover essentials such as membership of our professional body NCLT, insurance, bookkeeping, and on line communication costs. We would love you to become a supporter member and make a regular small or large donation. Any amount will help. So please…