Cheshire West Crowd helps Cycling Without Age Chester get up and running

Cycling Without Age Chester has used the Cheshire West Crowd to raise nearly £10,000 and help people get out and about in the local community.

The Cheshire West Crowd, which is being run by Cheshire West and Chester Council in partnership with Spacehive, is the ideal chance for community-led ideas to be created so the borough can become more vibrant, resilient and connected.

Cycling Without Age Chester attracted 41 different backers through the Cheshire West Crowd, including more than £7,000 from Council funding pots.

The successful crowdfunding campaign helped the charity purchase two trishaws, providing an opportunity for Cycling Without Age Chester to take elderly people to local green spaces.

Zoe Boustead, Trustee at Cycling Without Age Chester, said: “Raising nearly £10,000 through the Cheshire West Crowd was an amazing sum for us.

“A really interesting by-product, which was unexpected, was the amount of people we met through the project as we’ve been introduced to some really helpful advocates for us.

“The process was very straightforward and there was a lot of communication to guide us along the way.

“It’s very accessible so people could donate a very small amount and we also attracted large sums.

“It’s open to everyone and I think that’s really important for any community projects out there.

“I’d definitely recommend it for its easy use, access to a range of funds that we wouldn’t have necessarily known about and how we’ve been able to meet new people to promote our project to a wider audience.”

Andrew Foster, Trustee at Cycling Without Age Chester, added: “I take people out for rides and excursions from care homes, residential homes or anyone else who is living at home in the community.

“It’s something I do for a couple of hours each week and we’re looking for more people to help us do more of that.

“It’s literally having conversations with people, learning about what they do and giving them the opportunity to get out and about.

“There are those who can’t get out very often so it’s nice to be able to do that for them.

“We’re now engaging with more organisations and the people we’ve engaged with have really enjoyed it.

“With more people, we’ll be able to do even more and ideally we’d be able to do it five, six or seven times a week with different organisations.”

Cycling Without Age Chester is looking for more people to get involved, whether that is pilots taking people out and about in the trishaws or new organisations that could benefit from the project.

For more information about the project, visit: 

cyclingwithoutage.org.uk/chester.

Use the Cheshire West Crowd to crowdfund your project

After launching in 2021, the Cheshire West Crowd has already had two funding rounds and, with around £400,000 contributed by the Council and nearly £770,000 raised in total by local projects, it is one of the most successful initiatives Spacehive has run.

The deadline for projects being added to the Cheshire West Crowd is Wednesday 2 November 2022 as the Council will be allocating funds from the various pots in December 2022.

All projects will need to reach their crowdfunding targets on the Cheshire West Crowd by Tuesday 28 February 2023.

The following funding pots will be available from Cheshire West and Chester Council in the autumn 2022 round.

• Community Innovation Fund – £250,000
• Youth Fund – £20,000
• Cheshire West Crowd Fund – £90,000
• COVID Recovery and Renewal Fund – £47,885
• Climate Change Emergency Fund – £10,000
• Tackling Poverty Fund – £9,865

For more information about the Cheshire West Crowd and how you could get involved, visit: 

spacehive.com/movement/cwc.