Back in 2011, Eileen Roberts, a local resident and member of the Church Stretton Area Partnership (CSAP), thought it would be a good idea to be able to send out information from the Partnership to the wider community. The emails were sent out by Eileen and Hilary Clayton-Smith to those on the CSAP committee who then resent the messages to their constituents. Many people throughout the town received messages second- or third–hand. Over the next few years, Eileen became solely responsible for developing and maintaining the Community Messaging service. Sadly in 2019, Eileen Roberts died and the service stalled.

To the rescue!
After moving into the area at the end of 2019, we decided to attend a local community group meeting to find out more about the town. By chance we were involved in a discussion about Community Messaging and we volunteered our time to help. As is often the case in the Strettons, one thing led to another; we were introduced to local resident Joan Arnfield, who consolidated the list of recipients and supported us to take on the service using a webmail solution provided by Joan. The ethos of the service remained: to keep members of the community informed about relevant events and information.
We did not promote the service, but word of mouth spread, subscriber numbers increased weekly and the service outgrew Joan’s webmail solution. We needed to switch to a commercial webmail service that could cope with the higher numbers and was free to use. Unfortunately, in 2025 this webmail service dropped its free subscriber limit below our mailing list level. A generous donor came to the rescue and paid for the subscription enabling the service to send out messages to up to 1500 subscribers. However, the funding situation was not sustainable, and after much discussion, Stretton Focus was identified as the obvious long-term home for the service. It is reassuring to know that Community Messaging can continue for the future.

As well as information about local events and organisations, there are now regular inclusions from the West Mercia Police, National Highways, The Medical Practice, and Mayfair, as well as both the Town and Shropshire Councils. Many subscribers have informed us that they wait to hear from Community Messaging before purchasing items for the Foodbank each week.
We look forward to the messaging service continuing to evolve over coming years as we identify opportunities to augment and complement the Stretton Focus ‘What’s On’ service and to support Stretton Focus and its volunteers.
We are very grateful to the community for all their support and the positive feedback that we have received over the years about the messaging service. We hope to be able to continue to provide an up-to-date and relevant Community Messaging service well into the future now – with thanks to Stretton Focus including us in their family of volunteers.

Rob & Sue, Stretton Focus Community Messaging Team

If you would like to be added to our subscriber list, please visit our subscriber page online: www.strettonfocus.co.uk/communitymessaging/
or just drop us an email: communitymessaging@strettonfocus.co.uk