Solent Youth Action started life as a youth volunteering project at One Community (then Eastleigh Community Services). With only a couple of staff in the early days, we didn’t need a lot of space.
Even after we spun off as an independent charity in 2006, we still remained based at One Community – moving from being a project there, to a tenant, renting a serviced office.
As we’ve grown, we’ve managed to rent a couple of extra offices in One Community, which helped us stay there for a little longer. But as we’ve continued to grow, and as more staff joined the team, we’ve run out of room and had to start looking for our own space.
This week finally brought completion – we finally signed the lease for what will be our new main offices.
It’s taken a long time. We first got the details of this place from the agent back in March… if you’ve moved house before, you can probably imagine what it’s like. It has involved a lot of work!
It’s all very exciting… instead of renting a few offices, we have a whole building to ourselves! And three storeys as well, with office space in a converted loft.
The other great thing is the location.
It’s only a few minutes walk from our One Community offices (and only four or five minutes walk from the town centre).
Finding a decent building with a lot of space, at an affordable price, so close to the town centre (and bus station, train station, etc.) was very lucky.
I’m jumping the gun on our official announcement a bit… it’ll be a while before we’ve moved everything across and gotten it ready for people to visit. But we’re nearly there!