One of the key criteria of the MacEwen Award is the impact of a building. For Jessica Prendergrast, one of the all-female Onion Collective which dreamt up and commissioned community arts centre East Quay, this was all in a day's work. She had studied a mix of politics and economics before going into economic research and helped put together the funding bid to show the Coastal Communities Fund how transformative such a community hub could be to the Somerset coastal town of Watchet. What surprised her is that over a year on it really is delivering on that. 'You do all the impact analysis, following the methodology and rules, but you always wonder, will it translate into reality?' she says. In numbers that is 32 permanent jobs, supporting 140 indirect jobs such as those at the handmade paper mill on the ground floor, and giving makers studios they can sell from. At 108,000, visitor numbers in the first year reached the estimates for year three, giving the town a significant financial boost (calculating exactly how much is a longer job though).
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