Southfield Centre News

27 MAY 2021

The chair and secretary recently joined a Zoom meeting with Live Borders staff and representatives of other community centres.

The position with regard to re-opening has not altered - community centres will not start up again before the end of August 2021. There was considerable discussion of how risk assessments can be carried out and arrangements put in place for a safe re-opening. These obviously centred around such matters as cleaning, recording contact details, distancing, sanitising, wearing face masks and so on.

At Southfield, we can see a dilemma here. While we have been provided with detailed risk assessment templates by Live Borders, we might spend considerable time attempting to complete these now only to discover that, by the time we get to August, the rules around issues like distancing and masks have been changed and our time has been wasted.

This is a matter for user groups as well since they, and not just the Management Committee, will be involved in re-opening arrangements. Of course, we do not want to be starting on this exercise too late either - so a sensible balance will need to be struck somewhere down the line.

There may be site visits in June to look at the circumstances of each centre so that issues such as stuck windows can be addressed.

If distancing is still in place come September, then user groups may have to restrict numbers. Live Borders will therefore look at whether room hire charges need to be adjusted to compensate for that.

As we come nearer to re-opening, user group representatives will be contacted again since we will need to have a clearer idea of which groups are likely to start up.

Live Borders has also confirmed that the vacant post of Community Centres Liaison Officer has been advertised.