The BIG Move

Work to extend the existing shmuHQ building is well underway and staff and volunteers are all settled in at our temporary home.

The preferred contractors, CHAP, started work on the development in August this year and have made great headway as you can see from these photos. We have secured a significant amount of funding to pay for the fabric of the building, but we are currently working hard on a fundraising strategy to ensure we have enough money to pay for the equipment to turn it from a fantastic building to a state of the art community media centre.

Our aim is to enhance the facilities we already have so we will install two new radio studios and we will have a big communal social area, similar to what we had in the old building but we’re also going to have an IT training room and a TV studio with a control room. We want to use the expansion of the building to expand our existing programmes to reach new people in our target areas.

Murray Dawson, Chief Executive of shmu said: “We identified a need for this state of the art facility in our 2012-2017 strategic plan as we have been short of space for several years. Our new space in Rosehill Day Centre is much bigger than shmu so we’re able to trial some of the new programmes we would like to run and use it as an opportunity to grow into the new space before moving back to Woodside.”

We are aiming to be back in our Woodside building by August next year where we will then look at phase two of the redevelopment. Our aim for the existing building is to make it into a multipurpose space which can be used for cultural events in the evening, for example a small cinema or theatre and for workshops or teaching during the day.

Murray continued: “The building was a core part of our strategic plan and it will allow us to develop other aspects of that plan. We want to do more of what we already do, we don’t always need to be expanding and increasing in size but with the work we are currently doing in Aberdeenshire we need to look at what that means for us as an organisation. We need to have a clear sustainable financial plan for this and make sure that we don’t take our eye off the ball with the key core work that happens in the regeneration areas of the city.”