We've been thinking...

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):

1. Engagement to co-design Bearwood’s Community Hub, with local people, businesses, organisations and our architects.

2. 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

3. 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.

4. 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)

1. 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!

2. 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!

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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. 

7. 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.

8. 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.

Community Hub & Coronavirus - what now?

For information on local support in Bearwood for Covid-19, whether you need support or want to give it, please check out our special page on this: Covid-19 Support

Like everyone, we’re trying to work out day by day how to best manage the situation. I’m Sally Taylor and I lead on the development of Bearwood Community Hub (getting word out, involving people, doing the business plan and working out financial/funding investment to make it happen). Along with our Board, I’m working out how to keep things moving whilst also looking after two young children at home. I can’t promise to move very fast!

What we do know is that when life returns to normal (whatever the new normal is), we will need places like the envisioned hub to come together and build further on the incredible cooperation that has grown out of our already-supportive community.

To that end we will do our best to knuckle down and develop the business plan based on the community engagement we’ve done over the past few months. We will do our best to work with the architects that have supported us and are currently coming up with designs for the space - much as our community conversations about those will need to be online rather than face to face. We don’t know how we can include those people who aren’t online yet, but we will think on this. Our choices might be limited.

If you would like to help develop, edit, be a critical friend on any of these things then please let me know at hello@bearwood.cc

Finally, here’s an update the three main activities that we had set up during our development period:

Bearwood Community Garden: we may continue to develop this with people attending one by one, but this will be dependent on a) whether the Church of England continues to allow people onto their site, b) the extent of lockdown measures we may end up experiencing and c) the capacity of volunteers, many of whom are either over 70, in personal isolation or now have children at home to look after.

Bearwood Business Network: we may look to arrange mutually supportive online video meetings, depending on if there is any call for it and (again) capacity.

Bearwood Trade School: in time we will look at the viability of delivering this online or we will share Trade School opportunities that others, such as Impact Hub Birmingham, if they start online Trade Schools.

If you have ideas for us then please let us know at hello@bearwood.cc - we’re all just feeling our way at the moment. But we promise to keep in touch.
Thank you for being with us so far!

Sally Taylor

Bearwood Community Hub CIC

Learning to Declutter our lives - Bearwood Trade School

Bearwood Community Hub Trade School is going from strength to strength! Hosted once again by Why Not Café, this session was all about How to Declutter. 

In exchange for the Lorna giving her time to share a skill, she had asked for some barter items. 

And word is spreading about Bearwood Trade School. Bearwoodians were delighted to welcome new friends from Balsall Heath, Birmingham and Brierley Hill to the ‘wood. We love to share the good stuff.

Once everyone had got their coffees and cakes, Lorna asked everyone to share with the group the one thing they wanted more of in their lives. And what they will have when they own less/declutter.

This led to discussions about the following things.

• Why did they want to declutter? 

• Where and how to start?

• What to do with clothes that no longer fit, things that need repairing and where to donate formal business clothes that are no longer needed? 

• How to let go of the things that cost a lot of money. 

• Sentimental items.

And these were some of the suggestions.

• Experiment with less of something. (social media, TV, fewer clothes).

• Work with what time and energy they have now. Five minutes? Clear out your handbag or bedside table. Thirty minutes? The junk drawer. Three days, the shed. Every Bank Holiday. 

• That it is ok to keep those mugs/plates/jugs you have a special relationship with.

• Decluttering does not mean you have to let go of the things that you love. 

• Make space for the things you love and enjoy using or seeing them every day 

• When decluttering you are not looking for perfect, you are looking for done. 

• It takes time. Be kind to yourself.

To find out more about Lorna and what was her why, with handy tips on decluttering and links to resources she used, this is Lorna’s blogpost on just that. www.bit.ly/tradeschooldeclutter 

Coral shared with us what she thinks of it all:

My takeaway? Trade School is not just about learning new skills, it connects communities too. Long after the session ended, everyone stayed to chat. Oh, and the tales from the charity shop manager were particularly funny. They need to write a book. 

To find out about the next Bearwood Trade School, click here. 

We hit the high street!

Our day chatting to 150 people Bearwood Indoor Market.

It was a cold February day, the first of the month. Quite sunny, but nevertheless a chilly one. Thank goodness we had our volunteer Town Crier George to generate a bit of interest!

A group of about 8 volunteers (thank you everyone!) managed to chat to over 150 people that day and Alex Hughes from Drawnalism captured so many of the ideas on his beautiful graphics, take a look below. Now all we need to do is bring this and all the other ideas for changes, outcomes and activities together to prioritise them and consider how the space at St Mary’s could be best used to enable some of these wonderful ideas. Good job we’ve got community workshops with awesome community project architects Intervention Architects coming up - keep 27th Feb in your diary for that one, afternoon and evening will be on offer.

What’s your priority? How would having a community space on the high street change life in Bearwood? let us know!

Here are Alex’s drawings:

Bearwood's high street Community Garden

Volunteer organiser Ellie Shaw has some news about Bearwood’s latest green space, and how you can help make it happen this Saturday.

Hello Bearwood! A couple of months ago a post popped up from Bearwood Community Hub on the Bearwood Gardeners Facebook page talking about a possible space for a community garden in Bearwood. I blooming love gardening and can’t help but LOVE the idea of having a shared garden on our doorstep.

Birmingham and the Black Country has so many inspirational community gardens serving their locals - like Dorothy Parkes Community Allotment, the Smethwick Foodbank Allotment and Salop Drive Market Garden, all within a stones throw of us. I remember the first time I visited Martineau Gardens and a volunteer had greeted me within a minute, sat me down on a bench in front of the most beautiful pond and handed me a cuppa, a dragonfly buzzing lazily about. For a frazzled new mum-of-two it was like stumbling into a little piece of heaven. Green space has a special way of calming the mind. 

We are hoping to develop the courtyard behind St. Mary’s Church to create a similar green retreat. It is such an ideal location right at the heart of the high street and has so much potential. With support from the Bearwood Community Hub we will create a space for working, socialising, meeting, playing or resting. And we hope to connect up with the other local gardens to swap seeds, inspiration, local volunteer time and promotion.

Our first step is clearing the site which will begin this Saturday 14th December so if you fancy having a look and sharing what you would like to see in your community garden come and say hello from 09.30am. We would love to hear your ideas!

Reducing exclusion

Bearwood Community Hub project development manager Sally Taylor reflects on her conversations about how to include people who are usually excluded.

One of the reasons behind wanting to pursue this idea of Bearwood Community Hub in an accessible place on Bearwood Road is to create a hive of activity and welcome for people who aren’t yet connected (there are lots of them, our research tells us) to all the wonderful things we have access to in Bearwood. To do that it’s really important that we have conversations with people who tend to find themselves excluded, unconnected to - or disconnected from - their local community.

With the mantra of ‘no community is hard-to-reach, it’s just that we haven’t tried hard enough to reach them’ ringing in my ears, I invited a few people from my personal/professional network who support people in vulnerable personal, employment or housing situations to meet and help me think through the following:

How do we involve people who usually don’t have a voice in the process of designing and developing the community hub?

The notes from that meeting have all been collected here. It’s a visual tool - click on it and you’ll be able to move around the onscreen ‘canvas’ just like you do on google maps, zooming in and out or moving right to left. If you have any visual impairments, please contact me at hello@bearwood.cc and I’ll describe it to you or provide you with a text version.

I started with my own network to make it manageable and ensure a more in depth conversation than an open community meeting - but with the confidence that starting small isn’t the end point - being as open as possible is. I also started by acknowledging my own privilege as a white woman with a nice house, many supportive friends and no worries about being able to feed my family. I and others like me can’t be designing a community hub. We can only be an equal part of it, alongside many others who make up our diverse community.

So what did we learn together?

That there are many opportunities to take the design of community spaces and events out to where people are. Perhaps it’s at a curry night in one of the Hagley Road hostels. For other leaders who came to the meeting, it’s about going back to the people they support and asking directly, then feeding back to me.

We talked about the importance of not falling into a trap where we view people as a homogenous group who we imagine to be vulnerable - and if you are in a precarious position in any aspect of your life you’ll understand what we’re saying here - we need to stop making assumptions and just start talking. Everyone in our community is different, wants different things, has different needs and brings different strengths to a project like this. But how do we find out what those are? We ask. Directly. Whether it’s me or a local resident who wants to help or someone from an organisation already supporting local people.

So that’s what we started. That’s what we’re doing. You’ll see on the link to the virtual whiteboard that we’ve already started imagining what a hub could do, how it could feel, how it should run, what difference it could make. Will you help us develop the detail, just like the attendees at our 18 November meeting did? Email hello@bearwood.cc or call on 07832259658 if you would like to help, contribute your opinion, or invite us to your local group. We’re building a picture of what a community centre or hub on our high street could be. Are you in it?

Your ideas: what a community hub could achieve!

Ideas flowed when about 45 people from across Bearwood came gave up two hours for the first #MakeItHappen meetings on 16th October to explore different ideas about why community space in the centre of our community is important. We started off designing a Tour of Bearwood to understand what people in the room value in terms of the assets we already have - people as well as places! Photos at the bottom of this post.

The big picture to your right is our attempt to bring all the different ideas together. If you want to see the detail it’s really easy, just click here to access our ‘virtual whiteboard’ and use it like an online map - you can move around the board and zoom in and out with your mouse or trackpad. All the photos of the work at tables is below as well. This can only ever note the written thoughts, which will never be as rich as the conversations that started and that we need to continue. But it’s a start - and there’s a lot there we’ll need to refine!

Got something to add? Comment on this blog post or email hello@bearwood.cc

Want to know more or be part of the next discussions and help develop the detail? Sign up to our mailing list.

Our next steps are to hold roundtable discussions with community experts*, about how best to support, involve and empower our elders, our teenage community members and the most vulnerable people who live in Bearwood. We will also be looking to broaden the discussion (reach many more people) as well as deepen the ideas and make sure we’re pinning down what this should all be about it. If you think you can help with any of this, then please get in touch with Sally at hello@bearwood.cc.

*Community Experts = people with lived experience or people who are leading relevant organisations

Enjoy the photos of different tables’ ideas and discussions. Aspirations for what the hub could achieve first and then photos of the Tours of Bearwood:

Please “#MakeItHappen so we can meet more people”

Reflections on conversations at Bearwood Action for Refugees’ monthly Community Lunch

Last Saturday I was very excited to have been asked to share lunch at Bearwood’s monthly lunch for newly arrived families and local families. At this lunch, volunteers cook (and wash up!) so that families can rest, chat, play and get to know one another. After lunch there was a choice of more play and nattering or Baby Yoga or adult’s yoga.

Over a good lunch and for a good time afterwards I had some great conversations about the potential for a community hub. Ideas about a cookery school that others have mentioned before and I shared, were greeted with ready offers of help - “I’ll teach my friends how to cook Nigerian rice and stew!”, or another lady offered “I’ll teach how to cook affordable meals on a tight budget”. There were other conversations about the importance of such a space too. I obviously come with my own ideas about how it could be helpful in our community. But listening to others is the whole point of starting conversations and the #MakeItHappen meetings.

Loneliness came up as a big issue:

“I have nowhere to meet people. My English is not brilliant. It’s lonely sitting at home all the time. If I had somewhere to go that I knew was always there, where I could practice my English and meet people, life would be easier. It’s easy to get depressed. ”

So did childcare:

“I only have family help for a short time. When that finishes I will have to give up work because I cannot afford the childcare. I don’t want to give up work. ”

Flexible and affordable childcare is something that we have always envisaged attempting in the community hub space. It will be a huge challenge, but one that we don’t want to lose sight of.

There were other challenges and ideas shared that different individuals at the lunch said was also important to them - or they knew would be relevant to other friends, most of which we managed to capture on paper:

“I would like to teach ladies how to braid their own hair”

“The space needs to be open all the time - the community needs to know it’s always there”

“I would love to take part in a community cooking club - teaching and learning!”

“Today it was nice to come and share the food with the community. The pleasure will be mine to come again”

“A play group and a cup of tea”

“I need lots of space to do physical play”

“Toddler gym!”

“We need people near by to talk to or to help so we can feel less depressed”

“Meeting people is important”

“A choir with my children - I can’t get to the library one!”

Lots to build on and many conversations to continue - some of them on the first open #MakeItHappen meetings on 16th October. To end for the moment, here’s a message from 7 year old Lucy. At the community lunch she asked if she could have a piece of my flipchart paper. She took it away unprompted and came back with this:

WE ARE ALL THE SAME

Learning and inspiration: Gather Dudley CIC

Author: Sally Taylor.
I took myself off to Gather Dudley CIC on Wednesday. Gather Dudley is a community interest company, a “coffee shop and creative community venue enabling and encompassing everything that good people are doing in Dudley”. Sound good? Sure does, and I went with the intention of working there, seeing what they do and how they do it - without prearranging, just turning up and observing. What I got instead was an incredibly warm reception from lovely people dedicated to social impact in their community and totally willing to share what they’ve done and how they’ve done it. I’m going to use the blog updates to note my learning, often in bullet points, so we can be as open as possible with everyone who wants to be involved in Bearwood Community Hub CIC. Here’s what I recall from over 1.5 hours of conversation - in no particular order!

• Community gardens can be tiny and still work well. (There’s a little courtyard area behind St Mary’s church where we are exploring setting up)

• Invite people in, find out what they enjoy and what they need. Say ‘yes’ to them and let them run with their ideas in your space. Then it becomes their space, their activity, you’re just the enabler of good stuff.

• Start as soon as you can. Show up. Be consistent. Even if the whole space is not yet developed, just get going in what space you can use. It’ll grow over time.

• Maker spaces don’t need to be massive. Just use space well. Ask for donations of old tools. People need to make things, and they can do it here.

• Be open and honest always - it’s the only way partnerships work.

• Shout about what you do and let people know it’s you doing it. Then they’ll know who to come to, who to work with. ‘Own’ what you’ve created.

• A coffee shop is good - people have a reason to drop in.

• If you’ve got an idea don’t be shy about trying it. See if others want to do it. That’s okay, you’re part of your community too!

• If people don’t turn up on the first day of a new group or activity don’t worry about it. If they don’t turn up on the second or third don’t worry. You have to show up. Others might take longer to decide if they can. Be there, be consistent, before you say ‘it didn’t work’.

• Incubation of new start ups, social enterprises, projects and ideas is really important and worthwhile. People need space.

• You can start with very little, don’t worry about getting going.

• There’s so much you can do to reduce isolation, help people feel like they belong more.

Sally with Loraine at Gather Dudley

One half of the Gather dreamteam!

Follow us - here's where to go for all the latest details

For those of us who have been desperate to get started but have struggled to carve out the time (that ol’ Bearwood Street Festival was a lot to deliver!!), it’s been a long time coming, but the Board have now charged project lead Sally Taylor to ‘get on with it’. A series of updates on the website and in social media have got us started, and now we’re just securing dates and space to kick of our first ‘Make It Happen’ meetings, where all are welcome to muck in and start designing what this thing should do, look like, and enable.

Take a look at our website updates. As they say, the devil is in the detail so dive in (and get a cuppa to keep you going): https://www.bearwood.cc/where-when-how

Make It Happen meetings - we’ll be finalising dates very, very shortly, just waiting to hear back from venues. In the meantime, take a look at what the meetings are for: https://www.bearwood.cc/make-it-happen

We’re new to instagram! Follow us @bearwoodcommunityhubcic

We’ll be on Twitter soon, but in the meantime @sallytaylorbrum will be posting on our behalf

And of course there’s Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bearwoodcc/

Let's get real!

via GIPHY

Funding bids successful! | The plan | Keep in touch

We’ve done it, we’ve managed to attract enough funding to develop the idea of a Community Hub and co-working space on Bearwood’s high street!  

Thanks to our funders SCVO and the National Lottery Community Fund, we can crack on with exploring the potential, collaborating locally, and business planning. If you’ve been with us since last summer’s pilot, thank you for your patience! If you’re new to this whole idea, welcome!

What’s the plan?

Over the course of one year we’ll involve as many people as we can in designing and planning what the hub could be and what it would deliver. We want to get to the stage where we have:

• a clear business plan that we’ve developed together as a community

• a location and an architectural vision if remodelling is required

• a strong team of supporters/leaders

• funding/investment applications ready to be submitted.

How?

We want to involve as many people in Bearwood and surrounding areas as possible to build the vision together.

In response to people’s ideas at the Build, Make & Mend day and the co-working and creche pilot last year, we’ll be creating opportunities for local people to come together to build on those ideas and imagine .  There will be creative and collaborative activities for anybody to join, and we’ll be asking for help to be as inclusive as we possibly can to ensure we’re involving different groups of people, bringing people together:

• We’d like to give young people the opportunity to come together and be supported to let their ideas fly.  

• We’d like to continue ideas developed with the #RadicalChildcare movement about how to make Bearwood the best possible place to bring up children.

• We want to talk to the people who are living on our streets about how we could be a more understanding and supportive community.

• We Are Bearwood’s community survey highlighted that there are men in our neighbourhood who find it hard to make friends or get involved in something other than work - if you’re one of them, we hope you’ll join us on this journey to develop more good stuff with more people, including you.

• And we know from online discussions and partnership with existing community groups that newly arrived families and new parents can struggle with isolation.

This will be a process of open co-creation: creating a vision, creating connections, building a community hub. Together. Whoever you are and however you connect with Bearwood and its surrounding areas. Please join us.

And then?

And then, dependent on what vision emerges and the support of funders, we make the vision happen.

A reminder of the original ideas for a community hub:

Here’s the Beartopia we imagined last year, which we tested a little bit when we did a pilot co-working space with creche and our Build, Make & Mend community day. And here’s what we think a co-working space is.

So finally, imagine…

An open, welcoming, collaborative space on the high street where anyone, whatever their age, can walk in, feel welcome and use the space to work, meet, create or play.  They can find out what’s going on around Bearwood from our community calendar, they can get a cup of tea and have a natter, they can connect with others to get the community project going they’ve always dreamed about. It’s central, on Bearwood Road, and perhaps they just happened upon it when popping out for some groceries.

Imagine a space that stands in the centre of our busy community and shares what other community organisations and spaces are doing, to further connect people and activities. A place where people can work, get to know others, find out how to volunteer locally, and contribute to Bearwood as a place that makes a positive difference in life: a fantastic place to live, work and play.

Please sign up here to be on our mailing list to receive updates or help out.

Thanks!

The Bearwood.cc team (so far!):

Sally Taylor - Project Manager & Board Member

Jo Capper - Board Member

Julie McKirdy - Board Member

Nicola McAteer - Board Member

Amy Martin - Board Member

Thank you to the National Lottery Community Fund

Reaching Communities Programme

And thank you to Sandwell Council of Voluntary Organisations

It's more than a desk...

Sally Taylor shares her experience of co-working and explains why ‘it’s not just about the desk’.

The vision for co-working as a social enterprise in Bearwood is about creating community.  Yes, there will be desks. There will be quiet space. There’ll most likely be a kitchen and free tea and coffee. We’ll definitely have wifi, obviously!

But what else?

Co-working is a growing movement that’s been around for yonks.  And it’s different to simply renting office space. The essence of a successful co-working space is the hosting, the collaborative feel, the ethos behind it. It happens in people’s living rooms, in local coffee shops and in dedicated spaces designed purposefully to enable and encourage collaboration.

When I started working from home as a social impact consultant in October 2017, I thought I’d arrived.  All those years of trying to convince bosses to let me work from home just a little bit more were behind me. I could see my family more, spend less time in traffic jams, have more quiet space than I had in the office or be as ambitious as managing to cook dinner before 8 o’clock at night (what an ambition for a working parent!).

But it wasn’t like that, not all the time anyway:  

The first week was great.  I was free, in my joggers, making a tasty lunch.

The second week I was really glad that I knew a couple of people locally who might be up for going for a lunchtime walk.

The third week, I booked my tour of Impact Hub Birmingham and signed up to their flexible co-working membership.

It’s all about the people and how they connect

I needed people around me.

Of course I needed people around me! That’s where I get my energy.  That’s how ideas are generated and developed! But I also wanted the quiet comforts of home sometimes.

The Impact Hub enabled me to connect with people - many of them working in similar areas, but not all.

There’s a lot of cross-fertilisation of ideas that happens at the Impact Hub between different business or social sectors, there are opportunities to network for business in a way that feels more organic than a networking ‘event’.  And best of all, there’s the opportunity to make more friends and meet people who encourage you, who want to share what they are learning about how to make change, do business or inspire.

The reason the Bearwood Co-working space & creche was tried was because the folk at the #RadicalChildcare movement that was born out of Impact Hub Brum, were interested in trying some of the things I’d been thinking about. So, Bearwood resident and #RadicalChildcare founder Amy and I got talking. We thought imaginatively about funding possibilities. And we started collaborating.  We were coworking.

Why was it different?

It’s not just the space.  Yes the light flooding in and the well designed interior and the sofas and the big spacious desks are important and better than I have at home (or ever had in any workplace, actually).  But the real difference - the difference between renting a desk or office and joining a co-working space - was the hosting, ethos, the atmosphere. It felt the same when I visited The Melting Pot in Edinburgh recently.  There is the welcome when you come through the door (EVERY time), the people who offer to make you a cuppa, the pot-luck lunches where you can’t help but connect with people over food, the ‘Food for Thought’ programme with some inspiring people talking about what they do, why and how while you eat cake and ask questions or contribute to their ideas.

Why here in Bearwood?

The Melting Pot workspace

Active hosting to create community by enabling and encouraging connections, is what leads to more socialisation, better understanding between people, and the potential for people to support each other and collaborate together.  These things are important for wellbeing - as individuals and as communities. And research by local community groups has shown that more of this is needed.*

When we tried it earlier this year, the response was huge. We sold out in days. Providing high quality childcare alongside the space was key for 50% of our participants too. People reported the energy they got from just working alongside people. Many made new business and personal connections. Others had a space where they could collaborate well with colleagues in a space that felt happy and productive.

And that’s what we can create in Bearwood for the longer term.  It’s not just about creating a viable social business that can sustain community action in a community hub, even though that’s an ultimate aim.  It’s about the co-working space itself being an integral part of our communities’ development - one of a number of spaces within a hub where people can connect, collaborate and create in our place, Bearwood.

The Bearwood Community Hub CIC is a new venture.  It’s a social enterprise set up by people who live in and love Bearwood.  We hope to find a suitable location and be open within a year (by Autumn 2019). We are open to all in our communities who identify in any way as a Bearwood (or surrounding neighbourhoods) resident, worker or visitor.  We are particularly focused on ensuring that people who are more vulnerable to social exclusion, isolation or simply not having a voice, are involved in co-creating the vision for the community hub. Please get in touch with Sally Taylor in the first instance if you’d like to contribute your passion, skills or knowledge - sally@boostimpact.co.uk

*We Are Bearwood will shortly be releasing research findings. Other groups we are in contact with, such as Bearwood Action for Refugees and Soho/Victoria Friends & Neighbours are constantly informing our work and community engagement plans by sharing their experience and knowledge.

What's next?

Bearwood Community Hub CIC is born  |  Looking for a space  |  Engagement & Consultation  |  Finances

In this update we tell you about progress to creating Bearwood Community Hub (click the link to find out more detail!), co-working space and flexible creche.

Here's a quick-fire update - 4 key things you need to know.  After that we'll explain how you can get more involved if you'd like to. 

One: we're official!

Sally and Amy, who started off the co-working space trial, have set up a community interest company (CIC) alongside the following lovely locals who make up the Board of Directors: Julie McKirdy of Thimblemill Library fame; local artist and Bearwood Pantry co-op member Jo Capper; and local musician, parent and social entrepreneur Nicola McAteer.

So now Bearwood has Bearwood Community Hub CIC. 

Being a registered CIC means we're a not-for-profit business and we can get on with some key activties: we can apply for funding to get us started, start trading when we're sure we've got something that serves our local communities well, and negotiate with potential landlords to find a good space.

Two: space

We're looking for a location on Bearwood's high street to start up a more permanent community space.  In the meantime we might consider where we could house temporary co-working, or a flexible creche, or community activities - but only if we can manage to secure funding to pay for staff time to do this properly. 

Three: engagement and consultation

As soon as we have funding to pay for some time, we will start a period of more intensive community engagement to ask what could this hub be, why, and how people in Bearwood want to be a part of it.

Setting up a simple co-working space would be relatively easy.  Providing a few hours of creche facilities per week to go with it is a bit more complicated, but vital to respond to the need for flexible #RadicalChildcare for freelancers.  Taking it a step further and working together as a community to set up our very own community hub is a whole other ball game - albeit an incredibly exciting one.

But if you're up for it, we are.  We've already worked with lots of people locally to understand what people need and want, but we're not even half finished yet, lots more to do! We'll be doing some social media engagement, but we'll also be meeting up for more in-depth chats with local residents from January, when we’re hopeful we’ll have got some seed funding. We know from our engagement work so far that there are some people locally who struggle to get involved or find the support or activities they want to be part of - but many of whom have incredible skills, talents and experience to share and offer.  This idea of the hub is open to absolutely anybody who identifies with Bearwood as their place to live, work or visit but we’ll specifically we'll be putting effort in to chatting with teenagers, people who've experienced homelessness, newly arrived families, single parents who are feeling isolated and older people who experience loneliness.

That's just the start.  Can we come and chat with you about what you need? Please email sally@boostimpact.co.uk if you'd like to invite us to your event, an existing group or group of friends, as a family or as an individual. 

Four: finances

We're crunching the numbers.  How can we make this work? What funding could we attract to help get us started? How do we develop a more sustainable social business in the long term? If you would like to help with any of this then please, come on board.  There's lots to do, we'll need to come together as a community if we want a community space that works for all.  If you're an individual who's great at writing bids or a business who wants to support in-kind or financially, or perhaps you'd be up for helping to run a crowdfunding campaign... whatever your interest we'd be very pleased to hear from you. 

What's the key thing that ties all this together? Building a collaborative community.  The opportunity to connect and work together for the good of people in Bearwood and its neighbouring communities.  Let's create. 

If you'd like to help or if you think this space could help you, or both... please get in touch:  sally@boostimpact.co.uk, 07832259658 or through our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/bearwoodcc/

Playing Out in Bearwood

A little bit of neighbourly magic happened on Milcote Road in Bearwood last weekend. Residents closed the road so children (and adults!) could play out.  In this blog, co-organiser Sally Taylor tells us about the day and how residents got it going. 

It all started with a video shared on Facebook from PlayingOut.net, the Bristol-based organisation helping people across the UK to enable kids to play out safely and easily.  "Let's do it here" said Anya. "I'd love to get it organised" typed Hannamari. "I'm in," I said in the comments box.  And we were off...

A few weeks later and we managed this: 

We had encouragement and support from the #RadicalChildcare initiative at Impact Hub Birmingham and we got in touch with Playing Out and Sandwell MBC.  All these partners helped us discover just how easy, rewarding and worthwhile it could be to close a road and get neighbours talking, playing, and making each other a cuppa. 

How did we do it?
The first task was to send a letter to everyone on Milcote Road, with a 'reply' slip inviting them to indicate if they were supportive or not. This ensured we had informed everyone potentially affected and offered people the opportunity to object or raise concerns. We also door-knocked the closure area.  This was the fun bit - having a reason to knock on the doors of our neighbours and say hi.  The response was overwhelmingly positive, excitement was brewing. 

Now that we'd got confirmation that people were interested, we contacted Sandwell MBC about what we needed to do: apply for a Temporary Street Closure Order.  Expecting reams of paperwork, we were pleasantly surprised that the form was easy to fill in.  It's the Safety Advisory Group at Sandwell MBC that reviews the Closure Order applications and they were very helpful. They were happy to approve the event, and clear about what we needed to do:

1. ensure safety of participants (including sufficient numbers of stewards, well briefed) and be insured
2. get red and white striped tape and a 'road closed' sign for both ends of the closure area
3. as an extra safety precaution arrange for a car to be parked just inside the barrier tape at both ends
4. get majority support from residents within the closure area
5. ensure that anyone who wanted to move their car out of the area, or back inside the area, during the closure would be able to.  

After the application was approved we had to provide the insurance certificate and risk assessment to the Safety Advisory Group.  Then we were good to go. 

We confirmed to residents that Playing Out would be taking place with another little flyer, made sure we had at least majority support from residents within the closure area, and that was it.  Simple. 

Having done this we now have the know-how and resources to help others across Bearwood and in neighbouring Sandwell communities make it happen.  If you'd like to close your road for playing out, here's what's available to you:

Support from We Are Bearwood

I am chairperson of local voluntary organisation We Are Bearwood.  The rest of our committee were very excited to hear about Playing Out on Milcote Road and are keen to help the idea develop more widely across Bearwood, so we've formally teamed up and put all our resources on wearebearwood.org.  You can go there and find:

• Sandwell MBC Temporary Street Closure Order form, plus a copy that's been filled in with example text to help you.  
• An example risk assessment for a street closure.  This is an example only, you must conduct your own risk assessment for your street. Every event is different and will have different risks. We Are Bearwood will need to agree your risk assessment in order to support you with insurance. 
• Example letter and confirmation flyers for you.  Others are available on Playingout.net.
• A calendar that tells you when the 'road closed' signs have been booked out. 

Contact details: if you'd like to do this and you'd like We Are Bearwood support, please liaise with We Are Bearwood playing out rep Dani Waugh via wearebearwood@gmail.com.

Resources:

• 2 x Road Closed signs, which will be loaned to you by We Are Bearwood on a first come first served basis.  If your closure area goes across a side road you'll need additional road closed signs, which We Are Bearwood can help you order and will cost around £35 each. 
• Red & White tape, which can be loaned out by We Are Bearwood. 
• Foam balls! This is the only 'kit' we provided - the whole idea is that children bring their own entertainment.  No one wants a broken window though, and We Are Bearwood has 3 foam footballs you can borrow. 
• Printing.  You'll need a budget for letters and confirmation flyers, so you might want to see if a few neighbours would chip in.  Photocopying can be expensive so depending on the size of your road you'll need to budget accordingly. 

What did we learn?

• That playing out is definitely not just for the kids, it's for everyone.  What games can older people on your street share? Can you make sure there's a few chairs out for people who might need them? 
• One person fed back they would really like to have had a meeting to ask questions and quell any fears about the potential for litter, property damage etc. Playing Out advise this too and you might want to think about it - another chance for neighbours to get together and for people to feel they've had a say. 

What are the next steps?

Sandwell Play Service would like to chat about how they can support Playing Out across the borough.  We're looking forward to meeting with them and will report back any ideas discussed.

We've already heard from lots of parents wanting to do enable their children to play out.  Other local authorities around the UK have agreed to have one temporary closure application for multiple roads on multiple dates.  This makes it easier for council officers and for organisers - less form filling and reviewing for all.  We're going to chat with Sandwell about this and, again will report back.  The requirement for public liability insurance is also something that is dealt with differently across the UK - some do require it, some don't.  We'll put any updates about this on the We Are Bearwood playing out pages. 

So the scene is set - head over to We Are Bearwood to get started on closing your road so children can have the freedom to play out safely. 

A Community Hub in Bearwood: inspiration & discussion at Build, Make & Mend

Build, Make & Mend / Sunday 3rd June / 11am-4pm / Free / Dorothy Parkes Centre, Church Road, Smethwick, B67 6EH

What can a community hub do for us in Bearwood?

We’ll be finding out at our Community Hub Panel, 2pm-3pm.  

We have a great line-up of visitors to Bearwood who are going to share their experiences of setting up community-led hubs and workspaces.  All are very different, to inspire us and get us thinking about what a community hub on Bearwood’s high street could be. We'll introduce you to those speakers in this blog. But first, what's the point of a community hub?

Community hubs, or ‘bumping places’ (we like this phrase!), are walk-in places situated in the heart of a community and run by local people to connect, support and inspire local people.

They can take the shape of whatever is right for that community. In Bearwood we know there is a huge community of creative people connecting and creating together.  We know there are people who have lots to offer but are marginalised, needing the local food bank or living in local hostels or on the streets.  We know from the workspace and creche pilot that a collaborative place is important for home-workers to feel less isolated or for home-working parents to access flexible, affordable childcare. And we know that our communities abound with people and organisations doing great things to bring people together, improve wellbeing and get new things going. 

Research shows that community spaces are really important in helping individuals, communities and parts of communities to connect and create together.

“Community hubs can promote social cohesion, by bringing together different social or generational groups; increase social capital and build trust; increase wider social networks and interaction between community members; and increase individual’s knowledge or skills.” from What Works Centre for Wellbeing.  

Spaces that we can identify with, feel welcomed into, and be a part of, are important. You probably know that from experiences at Thimblemill Library, at Warley Woods Community Trust, Lightwoods Park, or local faith centres.  So we know that, and the research proves it. Then let's act.  Let's build something that connects all these things, right where the mass of residents, businesses and visitors can easily come together to work, play and create - our high street.

At our Community Hub panel session Bearwood local Sally Taylor will welcome our guests and explain the vision for a Bearwood hub, so you can think and talk around how you want to help build that vision, challenge it, or perhaps re-work it.  Then our guests will tell us about all the great things happening or planned in their communities, through their community spaces. They are:

IMMY KAUR from Impact Hub Birmingham.  

"At Impact Hub we believe those that are willing to dream, dare and have a heart for a better Birmingham need a place where they can realise these dreams." This Beartopia project has been enabled in part by the incredible support that Sally Taylor has received from much of the team at the Impact Hub.  Amy Martin and Sally Taylor recognised partnership potential for this and developed the #RadicalChildcare local pilot.  The wider team have helped develop the thinking and helped in the most practical of ways, including building this website, creating graphics and photographing our progress. Partnership specifically through skills sharing has been a really positive model.

How could we build this kind of skills-sharing model in Bearwood and what do we dare to dream together?

DANIEL BLYDEN, another Impact Hub team member, will share stories from the development of Gather Dudley + CoLab Dudley.

Gather Dudley can’t join us as they have a community Big Lunch on the same day - good luck with it folks! - so we’ve asked Daniel to share his perspective. Here’s how the team in Dudley describe themselves:

“We invite participation by people with diverse experiences, skills, talents, knowledges and interests, from different sectors of society. In Dudley we have met and connected hundreds of doers; people with all kinds of skills, talents and knowledge who want to connect and co-operate in practical activities and projects which make the place they live feel safe, kinder and creative.”

How can we best invite and encourage participation in Bearwood, to help our neighbourhood feel safe, kinder and creative?

LORNA BREWSTER will talk about her new leadership role at co-working space Moseley Exchange, as she develops her thinking about next steps for the Exchange in involving and serving the local community.

“At The Moseley Exchange, we have worked to create a flexible place where you can find the people and resources you need, whether that be a quiet place to work, printing facilities, intelligent conversation, or simply just a hot cup of coffee.”

How do we design a space together in Bearwood that works well for everyone, whether worker, resident, shopper, visitor or passer-by?

PATRICK WILLCOCKS is going to tell us all about the Old Print Works in Balsall Heath. A large building with a cafe, over 40 workshops for designer makers and craftspeople, a coworking space, yoga studio and more.

The Old Print Works is “a space for making, creativity, sustainability and localism"

What kinds of spaces would Bearwood people need in a high street hub? How would we all be enabled to make the space our own and what difference could this make to small businesses locally?

Build, Make & Mend will take place at Dorothy Parkes Centre on 3rd June 11am-4pm.  The full programme and booking details are available at www.bearwood.cc.  Refreshments will be sold, prepared by and in aid of Bearwood Action for Refugees. Join us!