Huddersfield restaurant joins “sharing revolution”
A popular restaurant in Huddersfield has opened its doors to help people and groups as part of the unique, community sharing project, Comoodle.
Med One restaurant is one of a number of businesses across Kirklees who have signed up to the online platform and shared its space for the community to use.
Groups have already taken up the Lebanese restaurant’s “space share” offer of its upstairs meeting room, such as Community Catalysts – a social enterprise which offers health and well-being to people of all ages.
Mark Finch, project co-ordinator from the organisation, said: “Having the Med One space available for people to deliver an activity from as part of the Do Your Thing project has been great.
“We have been able to link into the community with far greater ease and at no cost thanks to Comoodle. It has opened doors that were otherwise closed to our groups.
“Resources are tight and we need to help ourselves to help each other. There must be so many rooms in towns that aren’t being used and that’s a waste.”
Another user of Med One’s space is risk management specialists Horizon Risk Consultancy which used it to deliver free safety training to Marsden Community Trust and the Denby Dale Centre.
Sandy Lu, Horizon’s director, said: “One of the biggest challenges for any business is raising your profile. By offering free training through Comoodle, I have been able to promote Horizon’s services and generate useful leads. I’m continuing to use Comoodle to roll out other courses now too.”
Med One’s room is set aside as an office in the evenings for the Jane Khalaf Fund, a campaign to help raise awareness of the problem of drink spiking which pushes for more to be done to tackle it.
Another of the range of uses for Med One’s room has been as a base for a Lego group supported by South West Yorkshire Partnerships NHS Trust.
Rebecca Thornton, a speech and language therapist with the trust, said: “When I heard about this space share through Comoodle, I knew it would reduce our waiting list for our Lego Club.
“Having an established group enables us to quickly allocate resources and we have been able to help the group out with Lego, and advise them on how to get more to help them grow and develop.”
The Comoodle project is a winner of Bloomberg Philanthropies’ 2014 Mayors Challenge, an ideas competition to inspire bold and creative ideas in cities that will improve people’s lives and that have the potential to spread to other cities.
Building owners and businesses can put any type of available space on Comoodle – from advertising in a shop window to sports pitch space or entire venues. It can either be offered completely free or made available for a small charge or donation to charity.
