A community hub designed to help parents and families during a difficult time has been officially reopened after a revamp by IKEA.
The hub at Callow Place in Sheffield was white and clinical before the redesign and is now a welcoming space.
The Star spoke with IKEA's visionary behind the redesign, as well as Councillors Kurtis Crossland and Dawn Dale and South Yorkshire Mayor Oliver Coppard about the new space.
The hub at Callow Place in Sheffield was white and clinical before the redesign and is now a welcoming space.
The Star spoke with IKEA's visionary behind the redesign, as well as Councillors Kurtis Crossland and Dawn Dale and South Yorkshire Mayor Oliver Coppard about the new space.
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NewsTranscript
00:00Well what we're opening today is a community hub that's been renovated by IKEA. It's all part of
00:05the Beds for the Babies programme. It's a £2.2 million investment to guarantee a safe place to
00:11sleep for every child in South Yorkshire and that's just fundamentally important because we
00:15know that one in ten children go home from hospital in South Yorkshire without that safe place to
00:20sleep, sleeping in drawers or boxes even, and we can't let that stand. So we're working with
00:25partners, be it the private sector, the public sector, to change how that works in South Yorkshire.
00:29So we've worked with IKEA and the South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority to set up a bit of a
00:36family hub in Gleeglas. I'm one of four so I've got three siblings and I'm the last. I don't have
00:43any kids yet but everybody else does and I imagine that having kids can be quite daunting and at
00:50times it could feel quite lonely and so I think the family hubs in particular are a good way of
00:56trying to build that support network around families so that we can help them educationally,
01:02we can help them physically and we can also help them sort of mentally. When you are a parent we
01:08are the experts in our children but it can often feel overwhelming and it's really good to be able
01:14to come and meet other parents who are going through the same lived experience as yourself,
01:18whether that be potty training, whether that be sleep, whether that be feeding. This space will
01:25be that space where one you can access professional advice but also the most important sort of advice
01:32is from the experts who are the parents and to be able to share that sort of advice with one another
01:38I feel this sort of building empowers people and puts people on a journey for their own personal
01:43development. The vision was to basically warm a space that was so white and clinical and empty
01:52and cold and to make it something that they felt safe to be in. It links us with families
01:59that need support, it links supporters with families that need support, it makes families feel
02:06looked after and thought about and yeah safe in their own community in a space that they live in.
02:14We know that families have been living through, we've all been living through a tough time over
02:17the last few years, we've had a cost-of-living crisis and we still do and so giving communities
02:22safe places to be like this one, a place to come together to have help, to access that help
02:29and it's really important and that's why we've worked with IKEA, why we're working
02:32with Baby Basics and why we are funding the projects around Beds for Babies.