About the Bradley Community Centre
The Bradley Community Centre is a gathering place in Coombs, serving the Oceanside region on central Vancouver Island. We're a registered Canadian charity operating from our hall on Shearme Road, run by a small staff and a dedicated group of volunteers and board members. Whether you've come for a $2 lunch at Connections Café, a fibre arts gathering, a food literacy class, a community wellness session, to vote or to rent space for a family celebration, you're part of what keeps this place alive.
What we do
Our programs and activities fall into four broad areas:
-
Community meals and food programs. Connections Café runs weekly on Thursdays, offering a $2 lunch and unhurried conversation. Our community kitchen also supports food literacy classes.
-
Wellness and information sessions. We host programs like Choose to Move and information sessions on topics that matter to our community, from health to home management to ageing well.
-
Rental space for community use. Our hall, meeting room, and commercial kitchen are available to community groups, families, and local non-profits at affordable rates. We host fibre artists, table tennis players, support groups, family celebrations, memorials, and public events like the 100 Mile Fleece & Fibre Fair.
-
Family and intergenerational programming. Through partnerships and our own programming, we work to make the Centre a place where people of all ages cross paths and get to know each other.
What we believe
Our work is grounded in a simple idea: lasting community change doesn't come from delivering services to people, it comes from creating the conditions where neighbours become participants, then contributors, then leaders.
Most rural community programming follows a service-delivery model. An organization provides something; community members receive it. That model has limits. It addresses immediate needs but doesn't build the dense, reciprocal relationships that protect rural communities against isolation and the slow erosion of local gathering spaces.
We design our programs differently. We keep barriers to entry low: no membership requirement to come for lunch, simple application help, no proof of need. We build real relationships, getting to know participants by name. We create a clear path from attending to belonging. Many of our active volunteers started as people who came for soup. And we deliberately mix age groups and interest groups so that neighbours who'd otherwise never meet end up sharing tables.
The result is something more durable than any single program: a community where people know each other, look out for each other, and increasingly take ownership of the place itself.
Our history
The Bradley Centre has roots reaching back over fifty years.
In June 1973, ten senior residents of Coombs held the first recorded meeting of the Coombs Hobby Pensioners Association, with George Hutchison as founding president. The group initially met at the old exhibition building at the Coombs fairgrounds, which they leased for 25 years. A New Horizons grant funded early building improvements, and the group acquired supplies for hobbies including archery, lapidary, photography, fibre arts, and woodworking.
In 1979, Lydia Bradley offered the Association a piece of her land in exchange for help moving her prefabricated house. Members volunteered hundreds of hours, and by 1980 the Association owned the land that would eventually become home to the Bradley Centre. After a decade of fundraising and planning, a GO BC grant enabled the official sod-turning in April 1991. The new hall was built, and the $60,000 mortgage was paid off and ceremonially burnt in 1996.
In 1982, the Coombs Hobby Pensioners Association became the Mid-Island Pensioners and Hobbyist Association, serving School District 69. For 24 years, Hildegard and Gunter Buschhaus served as President and Treasurer, stewarding the organization through its 40th anniversary in 2013. They retired in October 2018, and a new Board of Directors took over.
In 2024, the organization voted to changed its name to a name that better reflects who the Centre serves today: not only seniors, but the whole community of Coombs and the surrounding Oceanside region.
Governance and contact
Bradley Community Centre Association is a registered Canadian charity BN 132637877RR0001, governed by a volunteer Board of Directors. Day-to-day operations are managed by our Facility Manager, Araby Gillespie. Our programs are run by a dedicated team of volunteers without whom none of this would be possible.
-
975 Shearme Road, Coombs, BC V0R 1M0
-
Phone: (250) 248-2336
-
Rentals: rentals@thebradleycentre.com
If you'd like to support our work, become a Bradley Friend with a monthly donation