A community centre team scooped two prizes at the 2024 Love Where You Live Awards, celebrating its resilience and determination to bounce back from a flood earlier this year.
Our annual Love Where You Live awards, run by WDH, celebrate the heroes in our communities who go above and beyond. It was another difficult year of shortlisting with over 100 nominations whittled down to just 29 finalists.
The eight categories included awards for Best Garden, Young Achiever and Working with Older People and a total of 11,232 votes were cast by the public to find our winners.
Ferrybridge Community Centre was the big winner at the event taking home the Community Group award and community centre volunteer, Oliver Hajba, also took home the Community Champion award.
Ferrybridge Community Centre offers support to a range of people, from babies to the elderly. In January, the centre was flooded, which caused extensive damage and meant it had to close for four months.
Oliver was a key part of the team that fundraised and worked to get the centre back open in June, making sure important services were available again. He helped raise over £5,000 over the last two years, organised the refurbishment work after the most recent flood and set up a food pantry at the centre.
Oliver said: "I’ve not really had any previous project management experience, so it’s been a huge learning curve for me to step up and try to get everything back on track. There was a lot of work to do after the flood, but we all pulled together, and we’ve turned it around.
“We’d originally planned to have the food pantry up and running at the start of the year so that was a priority when we got the doors open again in June and we signed up our first members on the day we reopened. The response from the community has been so lovely, I think they wanted to see the community centre back just as much as we did.”
“I’m absolutely blown away to have won to be honest, everyone who was nominated alongside me was so deserving. I’m just really grateful. It’s been such a difficult year for us all so to be nominated and then to win these awards, to get the recognition after all the blood, sweat and tears is just lovely."
The food pantry at the community centre is going from strength-to-strength with Oliver at the helm, supporting those most at need in the local community. The pantry has been met with an almost overwhelming response, with around 28 members so far and a waiting list that the team are hoping to support further in the near future.
WDH Chief Executive Andy Wallhead, added: “The Ferrybridge Community Centre and Oliver embody everything that our Love Where You Live Awards are about. Hearing the story of how they have overcome such serious flooding to open their doors again and carry on helping their local community is an inspiration to us all.
“Every year our awards bring together the best of our community champions and it is always a pleasure to see them celebrated at our grand final event. Each nominee and worthy winner is another reminder of just how many people put in so much work throughout the year to make our communities wonderful places to live.”
Our Love Where You Live Awards 2024 Winners:
- Best Garden: Robert Cocliff
- Young Achiever: Mia Boggett
- Arts and Culture: Pontefract Reads
- Working with Young People: Xuberdance
- Working with Older People: Meet n Eats Diner
- Digital in the Community: Ossett Through The Ages
- Community Champion: Oliver Hajba
- Community Group: Ferrybridge Community Centre
To learn more about the winners and nominees in this year’s awards, visit the Love Where You Live website.
If you feel inspired to nominate yourself, someone you know or a local community hero who has made a positive impact on their community, nominations for the 2025 Love Where You Live Awards will be open next Summer.
