150 days of community in West Ealing

Many of us who live and work in West Ealing think that it’s a great place to live, work and play. But not everyone shares that perception:

It’s difficult reading isn’t it? Or perhaps you think that it’s about right, or at least that there is a grain of truth. Maybe there is, maybe there isn’t. With these negatives in mind, we’ve created a new project and we want you to get involved. We call it 150 days of community in West Ealing.

Launched on the 14th of February this is our project to everyone to tell us all the big and little acts of community that go on in and around West Ealing.

You don’t need to do anything you don’t normally do, in order to join in. We just want you to share your acts of community and kindness over the next four or five months with us. All the things that make you smile!

A bit like Facebook, you just share certain things with your neighbours. These are the things we might count as ‘building social capital’ – but we often take for granted as ‘just life’.

You can share, via images, videos, text, twitter, facebook, email, blog. A few words, a story, a picture or a video clip, a useful link, is all that’s needed. You might be recording something momentous or something very ordinary, something that happened to you or something that you witnessed.

We’re defining our area quite loosely – anything that happens in West Ealing and its ‘borders’ – Ealing Broadway, Hanwell, Pitshanger, Northfields, South Ealing. We’d love to hear from all of you!

To inspire you’ve we’ve created a non-definitive list of ideas for things that create ‘social capital’. We’ve already got 150+ ideas, and there are seven a week that you can use to inspire you. You don’t have to do all of them in any given week, or any of them – you can even skip ahead (or back) and do some of the other 143! You can also send in uncategorised ‘evidence’, too and we’ll tag it and organise it.

We’ll put together all of your contributions into a great big online list, so that by end, we can all see the great things that we do, and even more importantly, can do, in West Ealing.

This project is loosely based on the work of Robert Putnam (author of ‘Bowling Alone‘) on social capital.

Here are links to our list of ‘acts of community’ you can do over the 150 days of our project – have a look and let us know what you get up to!

Ways to send in your contributions:
Send us an email – 150daysofcommunity@gmail.com
Write on our Facebook wall – https://www.facebook.com/groups/124290860921562/
Tweet at us – @WENeighbours