Community
Blog
20.04.12 – Community Audit Events
The Community Audit events are as follows;
28.04.12, 2pm - 4pm – Love Where You Live? Keep It Tidy!
In Hunters Bar we will be helping to spring clean the streets and we need volunteers! If you are free at 2pm on Saturday 28th April please email uuscommunity@shu.ac.uk to register your interest, there will be a social afterwards for all those involved.
28.04.12, 11am-3pm – Bring and Buy Sale, Duchess Road Community Centre, Shoreham Street, S1 4SR
Want to sell your pre-loved clothes, books and bric-a-brac? Book a stall for just £5 and keep your profits! Email uuscommunity@shu.ac.uk for more details. Or just come along bag a bargain and enjoy some free refreshments!
02.05.12, 3pm-5pm – Swap Shop, Broomhall Centre, Broomspring Lane, S10 2FD
Bring your pre-loved clothes, books and bric-a-brac and swap it for something new (to you) and enjoy a free cake and drink! £1 entry.
06.05.12, 1pm-3pm – Love Where You Live? Keep It Tidy!
In Sharrow Vale we will be helping to spring clean the streets and we need volunteers! If you are free at 1pm on Sunday 6th May please email uuscommunity@shu.ac.uk to register your interest, there will be a social afterwards for all those involved.
27.02.12-30.03.12 – Community Audit meetings
In April 2011 Hallam Union conducted a community audit around 5 of the 6 Community Rep areas; Hunters Bar, Broomhall, Sharrow Vale, Sharrow and Highfield. The main aim of the audit was to find out the opinions of students and longer term residents in regards to their thoughts of the area they live in, to inform the Community Rep scheme that gives students a voice in their community and aims to build on relationships to strength the sense of community spirit.
In each area we are now holding open public meetings to discuss the results of these audits with residents from each area. We hope the outcome of each meeting will be to identify one key event, project or campaign for us to lead on.
So far we have had the meeting in Highfield with members of the Shoreham Street TARA, where we discussed various ideas for social events and it looks like we are going to be running a bring and buy sale in April for students and non-students to sell off their unwanted items.
In Hunters Bar we met with representatives from the Botanical Gate Community Association, The Endcliffe Corner Community Organisation and the Botanical Area Community Association. We have decided to encourage students to get involved with the street clean ups the areas already organise regularly and then to have a social evening afterwards.
In Sharrow Vale we met with representatives from the Sharrow Vale Community Association, we discussed many issues raised in the audit report. People were suprised that although 75% of all residents surveyed said they felt the area was a safe place to live, 35% of students did not feel it was a safe place to live compared with only 14% of longer term residents. In the end we decided to run a street clean up as this is something the group have run in the past. This was based on the fact that people’s greatest desire was to see the area made cleaner and tidier.
Unfortunately no one turned up to our meeting in Broomhall! However, undeterred we decided to hold a swap shop event where students and longer term residents can bring their unwanted clothes, books, toys etc to the Welcome Place in Broomhall and swap it with other people. This idea came from the fact that people’s biggest desire for the area was that people would interact more and there were concerns about rubbish in the area, this event will encourage people to chat to each other and we can give out messages about re-cycling and keeping the area tidy.
We were not able to hold a meeting in Sharrow due to time constraints and therefore we have decided to run a burglary awareness campaign, the area feeling like a safer place to live was identified as residents second biggest concern with 33% of those surveyed choosing this and 60% of those surveyed saying they had specific concerns about crime.
28.02.12 – Fortnightly bin collections
Sheffield City Council have recently made the decision to swap to fortnightly bin collections, Sheffield Hallam University Student’s Union is apposing this decision as we believe it will disproportionally affect students and that the Council have not taken this into consideration. If you too appose this decision then you can sign our petition.
Carl Hawkes, Welfare and Community Officer
13.02.12-17.02.12 – Student Week
Student Week is a week of free activities put on by Sheffield Hallam and the University of Sheffield students, aimed at showcasing the positive contribution Sheffield students make to the community, through their volunteering in schools, older people’s homes and within the wider community.
Events this year included face painting, mask making, street and breakdance performance and information about healthy eating, recycling and the lifecycle of a chick! One of the highlights was a fantastic herb planting session with Hallam Union’s Community Reps, in total 110 herb pots were made by children during the week in the Winter Gardens. They could choose from chives, basil or parsley and were given instructions of how to look after their herbs once they got home.
One Mum said “this is fantastic, it’s such a good idea. My children will love watching the herbs grow. I think it’s great that students are doing this and I can’t believe it’s free!”
24.11.11 – Meet and Greet with key partners
An exremely important part of the Community Rep project are the links with key local partners, these links will allow the Community Reps to confidently refer people to the right services when required. We therefore arranged a meet and greet session with a number of local partners including Rebecca Maddox, Chair of the Central Community Assembly, PCSO Donna Taylor and PCSO Lisa Homes and Tracy Rayworth from the Good Neighbours Team.
It was clear that there were many ways the Community Reps could link with these services, things discussed included advertising for snow volunteers across the 6 Community Rep areas and the promotion of schemes such as ‘Immobilise’, where people can register their property so that it can easily be traced if stolen – http://www.immobilise.com/
Serena Arloff, Campaigns Co-ordinator
10.11.11 – Community Cohesion Seminar
This seminar saw key people from local community groups, faith groups and the Council come together to discuss the Council’s proposed 11 community cohesion priorities. After rather a slow start, the discussions really became interesting, especially when we were divided into tables and had to discuss community priorities in the agenda. There were some really useful discussions about various aspects of the agenda, including student issues, extremism, local community issues and figuring out what social solutions would best to resolve these problems. I feel there was a lot of focus on Muslim communities as there were various representatives from this group, which moved a large part of the discussion towards attitudes towards extremism and tolerance, etc. I think it would have been interesting to also focus other minorities, refugees, and white British-born groups.
Altogether, I felt it was a very rewarding experience, had a chance to meet different people from different organisations, different backgrounds and with very different ideas about community and how we should move together towards a more unified Sheffield.
Simona Pantiru
Volunteer Community Research Assistant
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