150 days of community in West Ealing: Week 5

Today is the start of Week 5 of our 150 days of community project. Don’t know what we’re talking about? Then click here.

Here are some examples of ‘acts of community’ people have sent us over the last week:

Tea pop upEight or so neighbours (almost) spontaneously turned up at the pop-up vintage tea-room on Sat March 8th and drank tea, ate cake and chatted. It’s strange that it’s extraordinary but above all, it’s just brilliant. Thank you ’150 events’ for making such simple things possible.

-Gill, 10 March

Here’s our next list of seven things we reckon are good for making things better in West Ealing:

We’d love to hear from you if you do any of these things, or anything else that makes people smile in West Ealing. We have loads more suggestions of things you can do, if you want to jump ahead!

Ways to send us your contributions:

Send us an email – 150daysofcommunity@gmail.com
Write on our Facebook wall – https://www.facebook.com/groups/124290860921562/ 
Tweet at us – @WENeighbours
Add a comment to this blog post (below)

150 days of community in West Ealing: Week 4

Today is the start of Week 4 of our 150 days of community project. Don’t know what we’re talking about? Then click here.

Here are some examples of ‘acts of community’ people have sent us over the last week:

Our first suggestion was about supporting local shops –

Our suggestion about joining local sports team garnered some interest as well –

All great stuff, and we hope to see even more in the coming days and weeks.

Here’s our next list of seven things we reckon are good for making things better in West Ealing:

We’d love to hear from you if you do any of these things, or anything else that makes people smile in West Ealing. We have loads more suggestions of things you can do, if you want to jump ahead!

Ways to send us your contributions:

Send us an email – 150daysofcommunity@gmail.com
Write on our Facebook wall – https://www.facebook.com/groups/124290860921562/ 
Tweet at us – @WENeighbours
Add a comment to this blog post (below)

150 days of community in West Ealing: Week 3

Today is the start of Week 3 of our 150 days of community project. Don’t know what we’re talking about? Then click here.

Here are some lovely examples of ‘acts of community’ people have sent us over the last week:

Bus flowersHappy spring time everyone!

Just sharing a picture of the lovely crocuses on Ealing Green … snapped from the top of Bus 65 yesterday afternoon 🙂

-James

Grosvenor Pub news.
There is a thread on our forum started by the new owners at http://www.westealingneighbours.org.uk/WEN-blog/wen-forum/wen-forum-group1/general-discussion-forum2/the-grosvenor-pub-thread57.0 and we are invited individually to contact the owner on peterm@foodandfuel.co.uk if we would like to attend a meeting to get to know them and express our views

-Valeria

Ealing hospital.

Just some unsolicited opinion[n] for you all.

Unfortunately we’ve had to bring our little one into Ealing hospital for a little bit of treatment, and having heard and read bits and pieces of negative comments and being aware of the bigger issue of it being closed/ services being removed, we were a little concerned about how we’d find it. We have been given the best care I’ve ever experienced. Efficient professional staff who can’t do enough to let you know what’s going on and why. I really couldn’t ask for more.

– Jayne‎

Here’s our next list of seven things we reckon are good for making things better in West Ealing:

  • Support local shops
  • Have a bake sale for a charity
  • Help jump start someone’s car
  • Organise or join a team sport
  • Join a gardening club
  • Attend house parties when invited

We’d love to hear from you if you do any of these things, or anything else that makes people smile in West Ealing. We have loads more suggestions of things you can do, if you want to jump ahead!

Ways to send us your contributions:

Send us an email – 150daysofcommunity@gmail.com
Write on our Facebook wall – https://www.facebook.com/groups/124290860921562/ 
Tweet at us – @WENeighbours
Add a comment to this blog post (below)

150 days of community in West Ealing: Week 2

We’re now one week into our new project for West Ealing. Last week, we asked you for examples of some of your day-to-day ‘acts of community’ in and around West Ealing, and you sent in some brilliant stories. Things are starting to kick off (in a good way!) on our Facebook page, so please have a look there if you’re that way inclined. Here are some of ‘acts of community’ from last week that we really liked:

I was by the spirits looking for sherry, in Sainsbury’s, and I smiled at a lady next to me and said ‘I’m going to make a trifle and I only want a small sherry’ so she proceeded to suggest many things I could put in this trifle. She said, ‘Have you got any whisky at home’, I said ‘I don’t know, I’m at my daughter’s’, she said ‘phone her up and ask her.’ I decided eventually just to use fruit juice.  This was one of two conversations in West Ealing Broadway this morning. I also obtained at least five smiles from different people!
Margaret, a visitor to West Ealing, aged 89, who likes the Broadway!

We had two community fundraisers at Christ the Saviour School yesterday. Donuts for Dads breakfast, inviting Dads and carers that otherwise wouldn’t get to drop their children at school as they need to get to work and a year 5 and 6 bake off. We had 150 for Donuts and 28 teams for the bake off. Lots of smiles, lots of humour and I felt blessed to be part of an amazing school with the most lovely children. Made my valentines day.
– Diane

Now we’re into Week 2, here’s our next list of seven things we reckon are good for making things better in West Ealing:

  • Volunteer your special skills to an organization
  • Donate blood (with a friend!)
  • Join the community garden
  • Offer time, or ask for help from, a mentoring scheme
  • Surprise a new neighbour with a homemade cake or bread
  • Audio- or video-record your parents’ earliest memories and share them with your children
  • Plan a holiday with friends or family

We’d love to hear from you if you do any of these things, or anything else that makes people smile in West Ealing. We have loads more suggestions of things you can do, if you want to jump ahead!

Ways to send us your contributions:

Send us an email – 150daysofcommunity@gmail.com
Write on our Facebook wall – https://www.facebook.com/groups/124290860921562/ 
Tweet at us – @WENeighbours
Add a comment to this blog post (below)

Introducing 150 days of community in West Ealing

What do you think of West Ealing? Many of us who live here think that it’s a great place to live, work and play. But not everyone shares that perception, and that’s something that’s important to acknowledge. Here’s a sampling of some of the less pleasant tweets about our area from the past few years

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 resolved to create a new project – starting today – and we want you to get involved. We call it 150 days of community in West Ealing.

Neighbours  in and around West Ealing
Neighbours 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, the idea is  just to 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 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 summarise contributions weekly and suggest the next seven topics.

By the end, we’ll have all of your contributions in a great big online list, so that we can all see the great things that we do and, even more importantly, can do, in and around West Ealing.

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

West Ealing Neighbours wants to create the antidote to the impression that we sometimes have that people think West Ealing is a dump.

So, neighbours, we’ve got 150 days to make a collection of evidence that proves the naysayers wrong – can we do it?

Our suggestions for Week 1 – week beginning 14 February

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
Add a comment to this blog post (below)