Community Audit at St Dunstan and All Saints Church, Stepney

This busy and historic church, at the heart of London’s East End for more than a millennia, reached out to the CCT in its quest to better serve the local community. In a challenging part of London, where social change and deprivation have been key themes for centuries, the team at St Dunstan’s struggles to meet local needs because it lacks core facilities. Its foodbank is used by 700 people each week, yet there are no cold stores or dry food storage facilities. Administration is done in a corridor, and volunteers and congregation alike make-do with 1 WC and a kitchenette in a space the size of a cupboard. The Rector and his colleagues wanted to properly quantify local need so that they could plan to try and meet it. A Community Audit was commissioned from the CCT’s Regeneration team in late spring of 2022 and will be published in July 2023. It is the starting point in a journey where the church can better understand the community it serves and design and fund new facilities for it. The finished report will analyse local population trends, reveal (through questionnaires) what local people want from the church and assess which gaps in community facilities it might fill.