Closer to home for one school community in Guernsey, a door has opened. The Village at Le Murier project in St Sampson’s, built so that young people with special educational needs can learn to live independently, welcomed its first students’ footsteps in September: two cabins and a wilderness area, the first physical pieces of a plan meant to ground them in the essentials of daily life, back their independent living and widen their shot at employment. For the families who have waited on it, the opening is not a construction milestone. It is the point where the idea starts paying back.
What the students walk into, in the words of the man who now serves as village warden, Gary Dovey, are cabins he calls the “poshest ski cabin or ski lodge you’ve ever been to”. “They are stunning and they have really exceeded my expectations… and the students are definitely not slumming it.” Seeing them open, he told BBC Radio Guernsey, “really is a dream come true because it has been niggling away in my head for years.” The design brief shows the care: of the four cabins planned, three will house up to eight students with a staff member each, and one is fully accessible to disabled users, sized for four students and two staff. The second pair, the charity hopes, arrives by the end of the year.
The vision behind the buildings is older than the timber. David Becker, a director of the charity, traces it to the school’s founding idea, an area for students to build development and training in skills such as independent living, which, as he put it, “never really happened” until Dovey, then a teacher at the school, set up a separate initiative to build residential cabins beside it, giving children residential opportunities they might not otherwise get, “such as learning to cook a meal for themselves”. The finished site will hold more than beds: a village hall holding a classroom, a workroom and a commercial kitchen; a camping strip for Duke of Edinburgh-style activities; a wilderness space for environmental education; and a small working farm where students will tend animals and raise produce.
The money chapter is its own quiet epic. Roughly a decade of fundraising produced the £2m that got the village this far, powered by what Becker calls “amazingly generous benefactors”, and the next phase of fundraising is already running for two further cabins, with some £600,000 still needed. Dovey explains the arithmetic with a wince and a smile: “We will need £600,000 to get it all done because when you buy the big wooden shed there is no furniture, flooring or toilets inside,” he said. “So, we want to do it properly.” One fundraising push in July captured the community spirit, a Deloitte team walking a full 24 hours around the Footes Lane track with about 60 people taking turns, a couple completing the whole day, 3,100 laps in all, and around 100 Le Murier schoolchildren joining on the Friday afternoon. “It was chaos,” Becker said of that day, “But it was really nice to see the people we’re raising money for and take part together.”
What it means for the people at the center of it is Dovey’s bottom line: “We want to provide a place where we can teach all the life skills to make students with additional needs lead a life as independent as possible.” He is frank that independence will not be the outcome for everyone, “but if you can live your life independently then that can only be a good thing.” A village of four cabins will not change the world. For the young people of one small island, it changes the part of it they will live in.
Sources
- First two cabins have been built at Le Murier’s Village
- Village for independent living opens first cabins – AOL
