The Oasis Café at St Clements Church Castle Bromwich has been open for 7 years and during that time numbers have grown and continued to grow year-on-year. The café is run entirely by volunteers. This year Covid 19 has made us realise that for The Oasis Cafe to be able to re-open and once again serve the Community in which we live, we need to continue to build on the work already started, making it the place to share and come together where we can welcome all once again.

We are now looking in a positive way on how we move forward. Our facilities which before Covid were adequate are now clearly not. Going forward it is apparent that the need to refurbish, re-locate the kitchen, and make the café area itself Covid 19 safe, so that we can fling open our doors once again, is the first part of the programme to getting The Café back up and running. The Café is very much for the Community so it is not about profit and therefore raising money has always been part of what we were doing to enable us to enhance our facilities, which is now urgent.

The platform we built on and which the Oasis Café was founded is still very relevant now and will be even more so in the future. We need to start the process of getting everything necessary to make it possible to re-open the Café so that it can once again serve the Community. What will we take away from 2020 is the need to keep learning, to stay positive and to once again keep hold of the gratitude for the life we all have.