We’re delighted to be settling into our new home for the New Year – Trafford House.

 

As a charity, we’re in a unique position. We have nearly 40 years’ worth of history delivering services, but the energy and culture of a new start-up due to our disaffiliation from a national charity in 2017. That’s old news now, read about it here.

 

Within our history, we’ve been operating from our building on Chester Road for 38 years, alongside our office in Stockport and outposts across Greater Manchester. Chester Road is our oldest premises, which has not only supported tens of thousands of people and even received a visit from Princess Diana in 1990, but half the building has been the main home of our ‘behind the scenes’ staff.

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In the last 38 years, our team has grown remarkably, alongside our charity in general which has grown by 400% in the last five years. This is great, but a problem was emerging. We were running out of desks for staff on new projects, we were becoming less able to host visitors and the space we were taking up was restricting the potential for delivering more support – which is in demand.

 

So, we took the huge step that most companies dread… sourcing a new premises. After around 6 months of property viewing, contract signing, IT sorting and lots of car journeys, we’re happy to announce that our new office home is Trafford House. If you’ve ever moved house, it’s kind of like that but… for about 40+ people.

 

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Trafford House is just around the corner from our Chester Road office, which we’ll be keeping for service delivery. The former office space at Chester Road now doubles the size of our client-facing rooms, which will be transformed and available for use soon.

 

The new Trafford House location not only provides enough desks for office-based staff, but gives our team the much needed meeting space we need and has room built-in for further growth. The serviced, open-plan office is the first of its kind we’ve had at TLC and will be a place that represents our open, vibrant and transparent culture where everyone is welcome.

 

The meeting space available and our new hot desks also create a base for our staff and volunteers who are out and about across Greater Manchester, where they can drop by, grab a brew and catch up with other team members.

 

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This move marks a key moment in the history for our charity and is unlikely to be the last new office we see! Our CEO, Michelle, said;

 

This move was long over-due and we’re all really excited by it! Every staff member, volunteer and partner of TLC will benefit from the new space, not to mention how happy we are that we can increase the rooms available for service delivery. Now that we’re in, we’re looking forward to decorating the new office and making it our home. If you’re in the neighbourhood, feel free to stop by! – Michelle Hill CEO

 

If you were interested in supporting us to refurbish our Chester Road office to enable us to deliver more services to those who need it most, we’d love your support! It’s an exciting and creative project that will make a real difference to people in Manchester. Interested?