IN winning one of the top prizes at this year's prestigious business festival, the Borrowers Toy Library hopes it will help secure its future.

At an awards dinner at Malvern Theatres last Thursday, Borrowers co-ordinator Sue Hancox beat off the competition to take away the Herefordshire and Worcestershire Business Festival 2003's prize as Community Business of the Year.

With only one salaried-member of staff, the toy library relies on 30 volunteers and grant funding to keep its services running.

Although they received £100,000 lottery funding in 2000, Ms Hancox still describes the group as non-sustainable. Yet she was confident it would continue.

"We will find funding, I'm determined. There is money out there it's just a case of finding it," she said.

"The award will support us. The fact that we have been identified as the community business of Worcestershire and Herefordshire will have such a dramatic effect on our funding applications."

The library has been operating for seven years - established to give families in Malvern access to toys and learning materials.

That core purpose remains the same today and has been extended to help anyone working with children including those, thanks to a mobile service, in other parts of Worcestershire such as Redditch, Bromsgrove, Stourport, Kidderminster and Worcester.

Judges paid tribute to the work. They said the Borrowers had an "impressive commitment to user involvement and provided a socially inclusive service which was well managed, especially for the user and volunteers."

There are no Barbie dolls, Pokemon or Playstations at the library. Instead there are around 3,000 "traditional" toys housed at the Barnards Green base, such as trikes, puzzles and slides.

They can all be taken away for free by the organisation's thousands of members once they've paid for their registration - a family fee of £20 a year allows four toys a month to be borrowed.