Dalston People's Festival - join in and get featured in our community newspaper...

Dalston People’s Festival is scheduled to take place between 13 and 20 July and the next edition of the Hackney Unites newspaper will be used to promote it.

Let’s Party
On 13 July we will be launching the festival with a ‘community gathering’ at the new Dalston Square. We will have space for community stalls promoting your organisation, and a range of workshops. We are also planning a ‘human library’ event, where members of the public ‘borrow’ a person who represents a particular stereotype and have a conversation with them.  The idea is to break down barriers and to increase understanding. So if you want to help dispel myths and stereotypes, and help people see the person behind the label, then why not volunteer to be a ‘human book’. This event will be a celebration of the communities of Dalston in all their various manifestations.
There will also be events organised by the Eastern Curve Garden, and Streetfeast so it will be a fun day in the sun and an opportunity to bring our communities together.
If your group wants to be part of this great event (and your welcome so long as you are Hackney based, you don’t need to be specifically based in Dalston) then please register your interest now.https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/FFYKB56

Let’s get our communities organised
Of course we all want to enjoy ourselves, but our communities face numerous challenges, so on 20 July we are bringing as many people together as possible from across the communities of Daston to discuss concerns and identify shared priorities. Whether it is unemployment, gangs, stop and search, benefit cuts or redevelopment and new communities that concern you, come along and share your concerns. We hope that we can get 100 people together with a shared sense of purpose to create a local community pressure group that:
·       identifies issues that are widely and deeply felt across the community
·       over which as a community we can have influence, and then
·       develops a strategy to address these issues.
It is going to be an empowering event, and we want you to be part of it.
 
But to make all this happen, we need your help, so we are organising a planning meeting on Tuesday 14 May, from 6.30pm to 8pm at the Trinity Centre, in Beechwood Road Dalston E8 3DY (the centre is at the Forrest Road end). If you can, please let us know by emailing Hackneyunites@btinternet.com to let us know you are coming.

Hackney Unites Community Newspaper
We already have a facebook page, people are already tweeting, and hopefully you will forward this email on to friends and neighbours. But to really get the message out we need to deliver copies of our community newspaper door-to-door and through community networks.

Our free, eight page, community newspaper will report on news from across our communities. The print run is between 25,000 and 50,000 (depending on the number of volunteers we have to distribute the paper) and it is distributed door-to-door, as well as via youth, community and faith organisations.  If your organisation has something to say to and about the communities in Hackney, this is the place to say it. Most articles are approximately 200 words long (but if you want to write a loner feature, please let us know) just tell us about your group and what it is trying 

‘Let Down’ – A day of action against letting agents!

When: Saturday 27^th April, 12 noonMeet: Islington Green, London N1 8DU

Join Digs, Islington Private Tenants and Tower Hamlets Renters on a mini-tour of local letting agents to call for…. 

• An end to fees for tenants as in Scotland
• Proper regulation of letting agents
• No discrimination against people on housing benefit

The action will be MONOPOLY themed, and we’ll have props and banner to give out on the day but please bring anything else you have including:

• Banners/ ‘adapted’ letting agent placards
• Monopoly props like top hats and monopoly money
• Anything to make noise with!

Share you Let Down story?
Do you have a bad letting agent experience you want to share? If so, please post it in the comments on the Let Down blog or bring it with you on the day – we’ll be gathering written testimonials and displaying them at the action.
Who are we/ worries/ questions
This action is being organised by local people from North/East London including the private tenant groups Digs (Hackney), Tower Hamlets Renters and Islington Private Tenants. It is part of the ‘Let Down’ campaign being led by London Renters.
If you have any questions or worried about the action, please email us at hello@hackneyrenters.org - we’ll be happy to call you for a chat.

For more info: http://hackneyrenters.org/2013/04/13/let-down-a-day-of-action-against-letting-agents/

Dalston People's festival - get involved

Hackney Unites are pleased to announce that the dates for the first Dalston People’s Festival have been confirmed!
From Saturday the 13th-20th July there will be a host of events going on around the ward. We begin the launch event taking place at Dalston Square on the 13th July 12.00pm-18.00pm. The launch will be a day of workshops, spoken word, music and stalls, celebrating the political and cultural life in Dalston. There will also be events in Dalston Square, the Eastern Curve Garden and in a former car park in Dalston Lane. If you would like a stall this can be arranged for a small fee of £10/£20, dependent on whether you want to promote your organisation or whether you want to sell food, beverages etc.  Please contact either lmcallister.jones@gmail.com  or andrea@hackneyunites.org.uk to discuss in more detail.

The rest of the week there will be a range of activities across Dalston.  At present there is limited venue availability so if you would like to arrange a performance but need a space, please let us know.  However, if you have a venue that you'd like to make available during the week of the festival, this would be greatly appreciated!

Please contact us by the 19th April to confirm that you would still like to take part and what you would like to do.

How Beyond a Boundary broke down the barriers of race, class and empire - by Selma James...

In light of the event in Hackney to celebrate CLR, the following article may be on interest....


Fifty years ago my husband's book on cricket inspired our anti-discrimination struggles – and continues to do so to this day..

• Selma James
• The Guardian, Tuesday 2 April 2013

Fifty years ago, after a March as cold as the one just gone, my husband CLR James's semi-autobiographical Beyond a Boundary appeared as the cricket season opened. Reviews were favourable, but none even approached the incomparable (and anti-racist) John Arlott's, in Wisden, "the cricketers' Bible".

It was the almanack's centenary edition (19 April 1963), itself a national event: "1963 has been marked by the publication of a cricket book so outstanding as to compel any reviewer to check his adjectives several times before he describes it and, since he is likely to be dealing in superlatives, to measure them carefully to avoid over-praise – which this book does not need … in the opinion of the reviewer, it is the finest book written about the game of cricket."

Hard to know from this extraordinary accolade that the book could not, at first, find a publisher. In desperation, CLR asked his friend George Lamming if he could help. Hutchinson had not long before published Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin, a great novel, and he used its succès d'estime to sell CLR's manuscript.

Years later I learned that it was Lamming who had named it – almost. He had proposed Beyond the Boundary, which the publisher changed to "a" for no reason we could agree with. "The" challenges all boundaries, not just cricket's – a true description of the book.

It was a book CLR had to write. He understood the game, he believed, in ways most experts did not and could not. He considered himself more scrupulous about the game's technique and how it grappled with team dynamics, skills, players' concentration and the psychological war between batsman and bowler, batsman and fielders. And he saw the game not only as it was played but as it was lived – and for West Indians that meant first of all a colonial society stratified by race and class. His unblinking description of the shades of status among cricket clubs cuts like glass.
Read on here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/02/beyond-a-boundary-broke-cricket-barriers?INTCMP=SRCH