Who runs Northfield Hall, and where does your booking money go?

Most people come to Northfield Hall for a fairly simple reason. Maybe it is a children’s party, a wedding, a class, a meeting or an event.

Unless you’ve had a reason to ask, you probably won’t know much about what goes on behind the scenes or who is actually responsible for the building.

Northfield Hall is run by Brackenhall Community Trust, a registered charity.

The Trust was established in 2006 and became a registered charity in 2008. Part of its purpose is to provide and manage a community centre for people living in Brackenhall, Sheepridge and the surrounding area.

Today, that community centre is Northfield Hall.

Who makes the decisions?

Brackenhall Community Trust is overseen by a board of trustees.

Trustees are responsible for the charity’s finances, its assets and the decisions made on its behalf. They also have a legal responsibility to make sure the charity is being run properly and in line with its charitable purposes.

The trustees do this voluntarily and are not paid for acting as trustees.

There are of course plenty of other people involved in keeping Northfield Hall running, from volunteers and people carrying out work at the building to the groups and organisations that use it.

But responsibility for the charity ultimately sits with its trustees.

What happens to the money from bookings?

When someone hires a room at Northfield Hall, the money goes to Brackenhall Community Trust.

That income helps pay the costs of running the hall.

And there are quite a few.

Heating and electricity are probably the most obvious. There is also cleaning, insurance, maintenance, repairs, waste collection and all the other costs that come with running a building of this size.

Things break. Equipment needs replacing. The building needs looking after.

Room hire is one of the ways those bills get paid.

Any money left within the charity can then be used for the charity and the hall rather than being taken as profit by a private owner.

Why does a community hall charge for room hire?

We think this is worth explaining because “community owned” can sometimes give the impression that a building is somehow free to run.

It isn’t.

Northfield Hall has to bring enough money in to cover its costs. If it doesn’t, eventually there won’t be a Northfield Hall for anybody to use.

At the same time, we know why the building exists in the first place. It was built to be used by the community.

Getting that balance right is part of running it responsibly.

We want people to know how the hall is run

One of the things we’d like to do better is talk more openly about Northfield Hall and Brackenhall Community Trust.

Who runs it? How are decisions made? What are we spending money on? What needs improving? What would local people like to see happening here?

Those are reasonable questions.

We’ve already started sharing more of the hall’s story, including the history of the old Brackenhall Community Centre and how Northfield Hall came to be built.

We want to keep doing that.

If you use Northfield Hall, live locally or have an idea for something you’d like to see happening here, we would like to hear from you.