Background

Overton Community Association (OCA) began the process of buying Overton Community Centre in 2016. OCA has been responsible for running Overton Community Centre for nearly 40 years as tenants. Professional estimates for conveyancing came in at about £2,500 which is 10% of OCA’s turnover so OCA trustees plan to do the conveyance themselves.

Decision making

The process of buying a community centre is, in many ways, more straight forward than a normal property purchase.

• OCA already knows the building well.
• The seller is a trusted public body.
• There is no lender involved.
• Purchase price is substantially lower than a domestic sale.
• The building has been on the sit

An overview of why we need trustees

From the Charity Commission's website: "Trustees have overall control of a charity and are responsible for making sure it’s doing what it was set up to do."
The Overton Community Association (OCA) is the charity which runs Overton Community Centre. While the OCA has more verbose constitutional aims (see below), in essence it exists to keep the Community Centre open and running for you. That means making sure enough money comes in, the building is maintained and any statutory tasks are completed. If that's not enough, the last reason we need trustees is that you can't legally run a charity without them.

What do OCA trustees do

In the

In 2016 we had a structural survey done as part of the due diligence for taking over the freehold of the Community Centre. This was the catalyst for investigating the ageing roofs on the Centre, in particular the old Headmaster's House. The Headmaster's House is the block at the south end of the Community Centre.

It is fair to say that the Headmaster's House has not had much maintenance in the past 15 years and that on old buildings roofs eventually need replacing. There is damp ingress through the south wall and a west facing window needs replacing. The main concern though, is the roof. Following a review from an expert the projected cost of re-roofing the Headmaster's House is arou