Dundee church café receives top award

From left: Stewart Murdoch, Dundee City Council’s director of leisure and communities, the Rev Tony Thornthwaite, and café volunteers Elspeth Petrie, Morag Beckett and Steven Wilson. Picture courtesy of the Evening Telegraph

A pioneering Dundee church community café has scooped a local community award.

Volunteers of the Main Street Café at Coldside Parish Church took the Community Group of the Year category at the third annual Evening Telegraph Community Spirit Awards.

The café, which officially opened in September 2015, provides food and a safe place for local, often isolated people to socialise.

It asks people only to pay what they can for the food, and also provides services such as advice on fuel poverty, budgeting and addiction.

Coldside’s minister, the Rev Tony Thornthwaite, said: “It is a great success story and winning this award is absolutely amazing.

“We only have one full-time member of staff and could not run the café without volunteers, so this award is for them.

“We are looking to address problems of social inclusion because the church is in one of the most impoverished areas of Dundee and there are a lot of single men, single mothers and older people in the community.

“The café is a warm, safe place where people can gather, eat what they want and pay what they can.

“All the volunteers are absolutely chuffed to bits because this award is real recognition for all the hard work they are doing.”

The awards ceremony was held at the Apex Hotel in Dundee.

Broadcaster and comedian Fred MacAulay, who hosted the event, said: “This was a hotly-contested category, and it’s heartening to see the vibrant network of community groups across Dundee and Angus.

“There’s a real sense of camaraderie in this volunteer team and a can-do spirit which impressed all of the judges.”

The community café was praised in a feature on the awards ceremony in the Dundee Evening Telegraph.

“Groups like the Main Street Café Volunteers aren’t just recognised for what they do — but also for the inspired impact they have on their communities,” it stated.

“The café may have only been running for two years in Coldside Church but in that short space of time it has transformed the lives of many of the customers who pay a visit on Wednesdays and Thursdays every week.

“Operating on an ‘eat what you like, pay what you can’ model, the volunteers dish up all manner of delicious homemade soups, paninis, cakes and toasties, and offer up fresh fruit and veg to take home.

“Its volunteers work long and hard to keep the cafe going and dish food up without judging, with a smile on their faces, and while dealing with an ever-rising number of customers each day.”

Coldside is the result of the 2004 union of Clepington and Fairmuir Churches. Mr Thornthwaite arrived in 2011 following a long vacancy, and money from the sale of the Fairmuir building was used to refurbish and modernise the old Clepington church, where the congregation now worships. The church was rededicated in July 2014.

The café, which welcomes as many as 100 people over the two days a week it is open, was set up with the help of a grant of £4000 grant from the Church of Scotland’s Go For It fund.

This article appears in the April 2017 Issue of Life and Work

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