Building Strong Communities

In Streatham, opposition to the LTNs has brought people together. Being shut out of consultations has made people feel powerless and alone. Not a good note to end the pandemic on.
Only by coming together and listening to each other can we take control of our surroundings, get a fair hearing from those who are powerful and ensure that every part of this community is considered as meaningful.
Consultations and the Planning process are too important to be sidelined, we now realise.

Enhancing intergenerational relationships

We have a Whats app group for our road so anything that happens can be sent out quickly to let everyone know. It is also a way of asking for help or advice from neighbours.
Whilst clapping on a Thursday night we would wave to neighbours that we wouldn't normally see. It has bought together the neighbourhood.

There needs to be a way of enabling/leading these things so they can happen. There needs to be work between local authorities, charities, MPs, religious leaders, and people to make these things happen.
The police need to act in a way that suggests a care about the local areas they work in.

A well invested ‘Community HUB’ in a Community Centre, a cohesive centre for the residents in London Borough of Newham (a project build to the size of The 02 Arena London) concentrated on:

The HUB will work for Newham residents with much needed help, prioritising service users with destitute situations (in need of emergency help in crisis situations such as “domestic violence, homelessness, mental health crisis and poverty and unemployment in Newham.).

The centre will help service users by providing:

A ‘well invested’ Citizens Advice Bureau (CAB), run by: paid professional’s and unpaid workers, pro Bono workers and volunteers (in collaboration with the universities with students of the universities such as Law students and Mental Health students). 

These service providers will provide specialised hands on services to people of the local neighbourhood, priorities will be give to people with disabilities, language barriers, low confidence/self esteem.

The HUB will work by offering:

‘Hands on Help’ and ‘Signposting’ to help the service users, fill up forms and appeals etc.

The Community HUB will collaborate with the Universities to recruit volunteers. The students that support the service will do it on a voluntary basis and will get the experience that is so needed before practicing after graduation.

The scope of the services provided by the cohesive HUB will give more attention to detail and more hands service, that is in contrast to the already available services provided by the Forest Gate Community Library, East-end CAB as they do not provide these services.

This is mainly due to lack of financial resources, staff, appointments, availability, knowledge and training. Also a lack understanding for the diverse cultural and religious needs.

In conclusion, the absence of a well invested HUB reiterates the fact where these services are not provided or available means that residence have nowhere to turn for help when required.

What makes a happy and strong community, is not being stressed driving home from work, which takes twice as long these days due to road works and the narrowing of roads due to cycle lanes which no one hardly use. In this pandemic people prefer to stick to their cars which is a Safer Way to travel .
Buses and Trains should be left for people who do not drive and school kids. this will reduce overcrowding and a much cleaner atmosphere. Road congestion charges are unjustifiable this will stop many businesses delivering their goods and probably loss in jobs. A happy community is people having jobs which brings money in the community and avoids poverty.

The list is reasonably comprehensive.

At risk of sounding negative, something that will tend disrupt the spirit of community is officials (both elected and appointed) who have a deep-rooted sense of self-entitlement; those who will ensure that their own and chums' wants are served ahead of those of the of the general community, whom such officials are supposed to serve.

Equally destructive are individuals and groups within the community who have no inkling of civic responsibility and yet know in greatest detail their own rights (actual or perceived).

Strong relationships are important between neighbours. It did not matter so much what your neighbour looked like and so everyone looked out for each other. Communities have broken down for many reasons, one being that there are no gathering spaces for communities as they are being converted into luxury apartments. Those that move into these new flats will socialise with people of their own age and colour. Others are ignored. A space to gather where you are able to just be, with others. People who are new to a community will only become involved in the community when it is something that affects them.
The streets where I live are dumping grounds. A large estate bin near one property is constantly overflowing with rubbish dumped near a house that is nothing to do with the estate. On pavements, (hire) bicycles, mopeds and escooters make walking a hypervigilant experience and not a relaxing one. On my way to work recently I was almost knocked over by a woman on an escooter, going at speed on the pavement. Make pavements a space for pedestrians and not all manner of wheeled vehicles.
Finally, it is difficult to build strong communities when you have situations where people are unable to enjoy their homes due to noisy neighbours and a local authority that says it will take action and does not. It is difficult to build strong communities when local authorities are focused on a night time economy that is purely about drink and clubs, this provides no outlet for all sections of community to come together. When local authorities are focused on income alone and not serving their residents we have even deeper divisions.

In my neighbourhood the streets are made unfriendly and more polluted by the larger delivery and construction industry vehicles that rat-run through our residential streets every day. Many are too big, and have to creep slowly along between the parked cars to avoid scraping them, diesel exhaust fumes belching from their exhausts as they do so. Sometimes they have to keep going forwards and backwards to get round the tight corners in these smaller streets, with their reversing alarms noise shrieking out and amplifying as it bounces around the buildings. How can a sense of community be maintained with this going on all the time? These larger vehicles should be banned from the residential side streets. The council's prioritisation of these vehicles over healthy neighbourhoods is one of the barriers to a sense of community redeveloping in the locality.

Ban e-scooters. It is hard enough to walk safely around our neighbourhood on the pavements with all the hire bikes either being used on pavements, or being parked on them so that they block the pavement, all over the place. It is made even harder by e-scooterists, whizzing along silently on pavements, refusing to go in the road or to use cycle lanes. Westminster council is to trial e-scooters, along with some regulations that are supposed to make users more responsible and the scootering less dangerous. But these regs. are utterly meaningless because there will not be anyone to actually 'police' e-scooter users as the zoom around. It is not done now, and it won't be done when there are hire-e-scooters, by the slow and rather meaningless WCC street teams, or by the police who prefer and need to concentrate on more 'serious' crime.

Much more funding for local greening is needed. Our HA landlord stopped providing community greening grants when the amalgamated with another HA. Fewer funds are available for local greening these days. It would be very supportive of community if the GLA were to restore and increase community greening funds, for communal areas of blocks of flats as well as for local green corners and spaces.

Many businesses just want residents moved out of their area, as having to respect residents' needs, eg for sleep at night, really cramps their style.

Make it mandatory for local councils to genuinely involve local communities in the earliest stages of decision-making that affects their neighbourhoods. Make it mandatory for local councils to recognise self-defined communities, rather than dividing an area into sub-divisions named 'communities' that are defined as such according to the needs and perceptions of LA surban planners & traffic departments, and community-free BIDS and other business organisations. These 'communities' may not relate to actual communities. Actual communities can be totally ignored in town planning ("place making"), and can find their residential or mixed streets being used as servicing points for commercial concerns, as entertainment spaces for attracting shoppers to nearby retail streets despite the noise and disruption, or as convenient places to locate clutches of street cleaners' bins, to park cleaning machines with engines running, and so-on. There is a desperate need for communities to have rights that LAs and BIDS are obliged to take heed of when planning business expansion, traffic and bus changes, deliveries times, waste collections hours, and so-on. Residential 'amenity' and quality of life no longer have any meaning in LA decision-making, and at the very bottom of the heap are what should be the rights of children to breathe clean air, and to have peace and quiet all evening and all night for study, for play, and for sleep.

Maintain, create and support a range of places where people can socialise - playgrounds, gyms, pubs, local cafes and restaurants (not chains), markets, open spaces, places for swimming, games pitches ...

More youth clubs and youth leader/paid and unpaid
Grants to build new and renovate old club building
Scouts/Guides Cubs brownies
Cadets
These use unpaid volunteers, encourage more people to join

I am not sure that I am working this system properly, but as I have said elsewhere, the elephant in the room is lockdown. The "state of fear" generated by it has to be ended and never revived. The reference to "People [trusting] in and [being] represented by institutions", both local and national, makes me laugh. I live in the borough of Lewisham, one of the Labour Party's one party states, which has actively destroyed local community initiatives like the Tidemill wildlife garden.

A strong community is a community that have the ability to be law abiding keep and encourage eviromental sanitation and respect of everyone in the community and upholding the plage to the community and keeping in mind to do what is what scarification to the community