When the Community Trust first started on its journey to support the most marginalised in the area, it knocked on 1500 front doors and asked those who lived there what their aspirations for the future were and what were the key things that worried them.

The results were overwhelming. The fear and reality of poverty, the lack of education and opportunities for their children and the uncertainty about their futures led local people to set up a charity and a company limited by guarantee, dedicated to the relief of poverty, furtherance of education and the pursuit of racial harmony.

Armed with the knowledge about people fears for the future the Community Trust exercised the Right to Manage and took over the management of 1500 social housing homes on the Stockwell/Brixton borders. Reopening the closed Community Centre and the necessity to lever in millions of pounds for the improvement of local homes, drove the Trust to orchestrate the birth of Community Trust Housing, a housing association led by local people to oversee the regeneration of the area and the building of new homes.

The Community Trust settled down to work from the Community Centre to deliver services to local people with the aims of the charity firmly set in their sights…