Our project leader Sally Taylor has been concentrating on looking after her young children in the absence of school and nursery, but she has begun to reflect on what the current situation means for the community hub.
We recently sent out this newsletter with some detail on ‘what now?’, and here we’re going to list a few ideas to have come out of community meetings, conversations with different groups, or observations about what's been happening in Bearwood since lockdown that we could help strengthen.
Let us know what you think in the comments or by emailing hello@bearwood.cc.
CONTINUING (when capacity, homeschooling and our budget allows):
Engagement to co-design Bearwood’s Community Hub, with local people, businesses, organisations and our architects.
Bearwood Trade School - moving online in a brilliant collaboration with Wolverhampton for Everyone, Co-Lab Dudley and Civic Square (previously Impact Hub Birmingham). This isn’t just about learning or teaching a new skill, it’s about human connection and we’ll be trying to enable that, and increase access for those with fewer digital skills, through our forthcoming series of Trade School sessions in July and August. We’re looking for teachers! More info: Trade School Blog
Bearwood Business Network will start up again soon, online. Whatever trade you are in, if you want to hear how to run an online business from local Mel Bridger of Cardio Central, or if you just want to meet up for a virtual office lunch, please join us. Details will be on here soon.
Bearwood’s High Street Garden: We WILL get it started up, but we want to wait until we know how lockdown easing goes and how we can develop this safely.
NEW AND BEING DELIVERED:
Work with partners to sustain some kind of arts/cultural offer during social distancing times - because our community has proved how vital it is to our sense of community wellbeing and hope through the street festivals and other events. The first is our Beartopia Art Exhibition. In development is a partnership with a major gallery in Birmingham to provide Bearwood teenagers the opportunity to hone their design skills and business acumen during lockdown.
A partnership with a major gallery in Birmingham to develop a design company with teenagers locally, building on our engagement work with young people about what they want their neighbourhood to be undertaken by the youth club at Dorothy Parkes Centre.
BROUGHT FORWARD (funding dependent)
A Community Bakery: our partners Smethwick CAN have been successful in securing funding for local refugee women to make bread and develop their own social enterprise, working with us to part-open the community kitchen when it is safe to do do and provide social enterprise development support. Until it is safe to be together in the kitchen, we can get set up with equipment and our selling platform!
Local advice network: A collaboration with the Black Country Consortium, a pilot resident-led advice network, harnessing the professional skills base locally to create volunteer network of support for people who have said they need immediate advice on (for example) housing & landlord issues, navigating the benefits system for the first time, understanding government policy decisions for family decision-making (e.g. schools returning). We need to know if you have knowledge you could share or if you are clear about what you need. Let’s match-make!
Street-by-street network expansion. What can the hub do to support the expansion of the developing WhatsApp groups and street-based or apartment-block networks? We can share practice as we did for the Foodbank collections, so more people can just get on with it. We can think about how to offer/broker leaflet creation and printing services so people without printers aren’t held back from organising. We can help think through how residents can work together to ensure neighbours without smartphones are included.
Street libraries. There is lots of toy and book sharing going on already. Imagine library ‘cupboards’ on every few streets. Built, decorated and maintained by volunteer residents and doubling up as super-hyper-local(!) noticeboards and, in time, working in partnership with local libraries and promoting the mobile library service. We can facilitate community design, support with materials and link up with local laser cutting labs to make.
Deepen our partnership and support for setting up Sandwell Borough of Sanctuary, given that most other partners are at the forefront of delivering food distribution and frontline services to the most vulnerable in our community and will be tied up with this for some time. We must not lose the local drive towards this.
Bearwood Community Hub develops our own capabilities for online, telephone and doorstep connection to ensure that we can involve even the most isolated/Covid-shielded people in designing and experiencing initiatives that support community building, reducing individual isolation, improving wellbeing. We spread our learning and development on this locally through generous leadership - working in direct collaboration with other centres such as Dorothy Parkes Centre, Warley Baptist Church and others - and actively sharing online our practice, processes and resources.
Deepen partnerships with Smethwick organisations providing Covid-19 response and geting post-Covid-19 ready, including business-ready local community spaces that need collaborative bookings, book-keeping and safe access support. This is a particular concern for church spaces who may be able to open for Covid-safe non-religious activities much needed by the community, but who depend upon volunteer groups with high proportion of vulnerable people.
Offering think-pieces, inviting essays, and encouraging supportive discussion about how our community of businesses and people can evolve through economic recovery post-Covid19, for a healthier community and local economy (and high street). Drawing on good research to push our thinking, from minds like CLES, NPC’s research on the social determinants of health and the many offerings of the Post-Growth Institute.
We can’t wait, we need to act now to support each other, to build on the amazing new connections that are being developed street by street, and to mitigate the already awful impact that Covid-19 is having on people and businesses in our community.
So please remember, the ‘continuing’ and ‘new’ lists can happen on a voluntary basis. The other stuff will take significant chunks of employee time, expertise, and, ultimately, funding, which we are now seeking.
There is a whole host more on our virtual white board, and if we can work out a way to get our CIC up and running sustainably over the next few months we’ll do our level best to deliver as a community - alongside you, with you and thanks to you.