The Pentre Comrades Club in Pentre, Rhondda is supporting its local community by opening a sustainability-focused village store and community café to provide important local services.
Many facilities within the former coal-mining village have closed down in the last 20 years including schools, shops, day centres and libraries.
Publicans Denise Roberts and Helen Roderick, have run Pentre Comrades Club for 30 years, with an aim of tackling this lack of local services while helping to bring back those community connections.
The community shop provides local essentials at an affordable price, enabling people to make their money go further and tackle food poverty with the cost-of-living crisis.
Sustainability is a major ethos of the business with the village store enabling people to refill their own containers by weight, cutting the use of plastic and helping the environment. The shop also offers eggs from a local farmer and there are plans to extend its offer of local produce.
By introducing a café the Pentre Comrades Club provides a safe environment for customers to come together, to help tackle social isolation and engage with different people across the community.
Expert help and two Community Services Fund grants from Pub is The Hub were provided to help with the opening of both the community shop and café.
Pub is The Hub, is a not-for-profit organisation that helps pubs to diversify and provide essential local services. It has been supporting projects in rural areas across Wales after receiving a grant of £25,000 from The Royal Countryside Fund. Sir
Chris Bryant, MP for Rhondda and Ogmore visited the pub to celebrate the opening of the sustainability-focused village store and café.
The Pentre Comrades Club recently reopened its kitchen after a refurbishment and is now offering sustainable cookery classes, such as how to cook vegetarian dishes, to people in the local community.
Publican Denise Roberts said: “We know that people want to belong and we know that our community is still very close knit and connected, so we want to provide a resource for them which can replace those missing amenities and provide a place for that community engagement.”
She added: “This pub is for everyone and anyone is welcome to use it. We have had great support from people living in the local community and we want to help educate them on the benefits of sustainable living as well as providing a space for them to socialise.”
Pub is The Hub regional advisor Roger Belle added: “The Pentre Comrades Club is an example of great publicans focusing on what their local rural community needs. This is really the hub of its local area.”
