Support us today!

Swanage and Purbeck Development Trust (SPDT) need your support to raise money to open a brand-new Community Café at the Focus Centre – a wellbeing hub for Swanage and the surrounding villages.

A Cafe with a purpose! ☕🌱

The new community café will be so much more than a place to buy a drink.
It will be a welcoming space for everyone—a place designed to bring people together, spark connection, and reduce loneliness in our town.

💛 A Gentle Pathway to Wellbeing

Unlike a traditional café, this space will offer a easy, approachable gateway to a range of wellbeing services. People who might feel unsure about asking for help will find a warm, friendly environment where support is easy to access and never intimidating. It’s a place where small conversations can lead to big steps forward.

Person in a pink tshirt serving up plates of food, pasta, ham and sweetcorn can be seen.
2 People from All Sort'd in a kitchen cooking a meal, one person stood on the left has a big smile on their face while chopping mushrooms and the person behind them is stood at the stove stirring frying onions.

🌱 Real Opportunities. Real Skills. Real Impact.

What truly sets this café apart is its commitment to creating life-changing opportunities for adults with learning disabilities.

Working alongside Allsort’d, the café will provide training, work experience, and meaningful employment for adults with learning difficulties, extending the work Allsort’d already do in Swanage into everyday life, offering real roles that make a real difference.

🧸 A Safe, Relaxed Space for Families

Families using Explorers Childcare and the Family Hub will also benefit from a relaxed, friendly space to connect, chat, unwind, and meet others. The café will offer a comfortable atmosphere where parents, carers, and children can feel supported and welcomed.

 

🌈 More Than a Café — A Community Anchor

This café will not simply serve food and drink.
It will provide connection, belonging, and opportunity.

It will be a place where:

  • Give local people with learning disabilities the chance to work or train
  • Provide young people with opportunities to develop their skills
  • Be a place to make friends and socialise
  • Give community groups a place to share their work
  • Bring people of all ages together
  • Help people access support for their health and wellbeing
  • Create new  ‘pocket parks’ where people can come together
  • Provide new homes for wildlife in the heart of Swanage

This is not another café—it is a community resource, a lifeline, and a place of belonging, built to reflect what is best about Swanage.

Donate today to be part of this exciting new vision and see things happen in Swanage!

 

 

🌿 Reimagining the Cafe Garden – A Space for Nature, Connection, and Community

We’re also dreaming big for the Cafe’s front garden — transforming it into a vibrant, welcoming, and wildlife‑friendly outdoor space where visitors, neighbours, and passers‑by can pause, chat, and enjoy being together.

Photograph of the front garden, muddy soil alongside the buildings, showing work that needs to be done to make the gradens a nicer public space.

Right now, the garden is underused and a little unloved. But it has incredible potential. We want to open it up so that more people — families, older residents, and individuals with disabilities — can enjoy a relaxed outdoor space that truly belongs to the whole community.

Whether someone wants to sit quietly and unwind, meet a friend, or enjoy a cup of coffee from the Community Café, the garden will be designed as a place where everyone feels comfortable, valued, and included.

Photo of the Focus Centre building in the spring, photograph shows lovely green grass in the sunshine and cherry trees in blossom in front of the building.

💛 Your donation can help turn the Focus Centre into a buzzing, inclusive hub for the whole community.

Every contribution brings us one step closer – thank you for being part of it.

A donation of any size will help us open our café in 2026!

Your donation could pay for…..

  • £10 A plant to attract butterflies to our lovely garden
  • £15  Kitchen utensils for the Allsort’d crew to hone their cookery skills!
  • £20  A planter for fresh herbs
  • £30  A toaster for those all-important snacks!
  • £40   Gardening tools for our volunteers
  • £50  Installing a bird box, making our front garden great for wildlife as well as people
  • £100  Training for a young person to gain work experience in our cafe
  • £500 A freezer to store delicious home-made food

Be part of something amazing today  💛

Donate to Swanage and Purbeck Development Trust Community Cafe Appeal – Give as you Live Donate