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