Workers Advice Project - Saturday 11 September

Out next Workers Advice Project is on Saturday 11 September 2 – 4pm, Wilton Estate Community Hall, Greenwood Road, London E8 1BE.

This will, for the first time, include additional advice provided by the ‘Raise Project’ who provide advice on benefits issues.

Please help us make this session a success by dowloading and displaying our poster (right) and passing the word around.

An evening of reflection and planning

Hackney Unite's resident blogger Mz Lashmore reports on our recent evening of reflection and future planning...

An evening in late July. The venue is Café Mostra in Stoke Newington and Hackney Unites have brought together local residents, community group leaders and workers to reflect on the Celebrate Hackney community event and conference that took place earlier in the year at Stoke Newington School.

The register from the conference had 400 signatures. Initial feedback on the day was largely supportive, with people saying how inclusive they felt the event had been. Analysis from the feedback survey revealed about 25% of those in attendance came from the community’s younger generation, those usually under represented in politics and neighbourhood engagement.

The evening of reflection echoed further those sentiments captured in the feedback survey and from those supportive discussion that happened on the day. With lessons learned and agreed tweaks for future events, the meeting turned their attention to key areas affecting our Borough: one being the restructuring of the National Health Service (NHS) and the other, cuts in community services.

On the table was a Statement of Intent from the group which in summary is suggesting Hackney Council explores an alternative to the austerity budgets currently being promoted by the Con-Dems government. Should the cuts go ahead as planned, the impact for the London Borough of Hackney is unimaginable at this time. The Chief Executive of the Borough is reported to have said, if the council was to cut back all office staff by 50%, shut one swimming pool and a library, this would save £16 million. But this is merely a tip of the ice-berg on the planned cuts for £80 million. The scale of job loses and the reduction in local services is likely to affect every citizen in this Borough and those beyond.

The NHS delivers health services locally and is also a large employer. The NHS is now under review with Primary Care Trusts (PCT) being given the main responsibility to commission private health services. This may seem like a cost effective move and is indeed being promoted as such by the government. In reality private companies involved in delivering public services begin cheaply, but those introductory costs soon rise and the overall service deliver becomes more expensive for the tax payer.

The evening concluded with food, wine, beers and coffee. The date for future meetings is to be confirmed via the website, word and mouth and other informal networks. In the interim, plans are a foot to link Hackney Unites with other political and campaigning groups for a coordinated approach to campaign against the country’s deficits - where the collective feeling is: let the banks wait!

Academic and student researchers at Goldsmiths College working with community organisations in Hackney

Hackney Unites is working to link academic and student researchers at Goldsmiths College with community organisations in Hackney.

The aim is to link community groups with researchers who can assist them in preparing an evidenced based argument for their particular concerns. We also hope to be able to bring all these small projects together to build an evidence bank for campaigners in Hackney and hopefully have an event where the research can be presented publicly.

Please see details from Anna Carlile, Lecturer in Inclusive Education at Goldsmith’s below and contact her to express your interest.

Research collaboration: Goldsmiths, University of London and Hackney Unites
The four ways in which collaboration would work would be:

A. An intern for your organisation: I place PGCE students (student teachers) with organisations one day a week. These are called 'enrichment placements', and are are intended to provide organisations with support to design resources, carry out projects, and support people, at the same time helping new teachers to become aware of and empathic about some of the issues they may come across in their classrooms. If your organisation would like to carry out a bit of research, a focus group project, or an arts-based investigation, this might be a good route. Placements do not necessarily need to be with young people or in education settings.

B. Collaborate with a school to carry out your research: The Illuminate Young Researchers Project trains young people in school in research methods. The young researchers then carry out their own research projects in school, at home and in the community. This may be a way to reach out to people not currently involved with your organisation, and will support young people to develop self advocacy skills, to make a reasoned argument, and to help their school become an active member of the local community. This might be a way to develop a collaboration between your organisation and a school, and to work with young people to carry out research into a particular concern. Recent Illuminate projects have covered safety on the bus route to school, lighting in quiet and secluded areas, racist bullying at school, and the role of the police in keeping school children safe on their route to school.

C. BA student research projects: I teach a course called 'Studies in Inclusion and Exclusion' on the BA Education Culture and Society at Goldsmiths. Their assignment is to carry out a case study of a person or organisation in terms of their experiences of and work relating to issues of inclusion and exclusion. I would like to invite four organisations to Goldsmiths to offer a research brief to these students, who would then carry out a piece of research and produce a research report for your organisation. The dates for these sessions are 20th January and 3rd February from 1pm-3pm, here at Goldsmiths. Please let me know if you are interested.

D. Research training and planning sessions for organisations: Illuminate researcher training can also be made available to adults in your organisation. I was thinking of starting this with the Workers Group, with other Hackney Unites people welcome to join. The training could take two half days and would help you to plan and carry out your own research project.

Please feel free to email me if any of the above ideas would work in terms of what your organisation is hoping to achieve within the Hackney Unites framework.

Best wishes
Anna

Anna Carlile, Lecturer in Inclusive Education
Head of Secondary Partnerships/MQA and Coordinator for CPD
Department of Educational Studies
Goldsmiths, University of London
e: a.carlile@gold.ac.uk

Give your views on Hackney to the listening project

Dear All,

My name is Jaya Carrier and along with my colleague Jim Barlow, I am working at St. John-at-Hackney this month on a placement with London Citizens and TELCO, both of which use community organising in order to enact political change in local areas.

Our project involves creating a listening group to find out about life in Hackney, what some of the problems are, and how we might best respond to them. This is so that the coming works of London Citizens in Hackney might be better informed and so that we can begin to forge good relationships with different people and groups in Hackney. Our listening project involves conducting informal one-to-one conversations with people. They can be organised at the best convenience of people (be it in their homes, or anywhere else) and are no longer than 45 minutes. It would be wonderful to have as many people take part as possible, so please do get in touch if this is something you are interested in.


Should you have any questions please don't hesitate to ask either by email (jaya_carrier@hotmail.com) or by calling me on 07709495578.

Thank you!

Day-Mer’s 21st Annual Cultural and Arts Festival- Sunday, 4 July @ Clissold Park

The activities of our 21st Festival have kicked off after a launch last week, and I am writing to provide information about the activities of our festival. Just as every year, the festival features activities for almost all sections of the community, with the major activity of our festival, the traditional Park Festival due to take place on Sunday, 4 July at Clissold Park.

Our multi-cultural festival is now the longest running festival in the borough and in the Turkish and Kurdish community. Just as every year, our festival activities once again brought to the fore strong messages of community solidarity and the need to create conditions in which the migrant communities and the rest of the society to work and live together.

At this year’s Park Festival, we will host the prominent Kurdish musician, Mikail Aslan, who have made a name for himself with his original synthesis of the traditional and contemporary Kurdish and Turkish music. Along with Mikail Aslan and his band, we will have Yeni Türkü, a band that has been bringing together Mediterranean and Anatolian melodies successfully over the last three decades, bringing forward the diversity of Anatolian culture. The programme of the event includes other performances bringing their own flavour of music for peace, unity and a better world for all. On the day of the park festival, there will also be stalls from various organisations giving out information, bookstalls and, of course, traditional food and drinks.



We would like to take this opportunity to invite you to the activities of the festival and the park celebration on Sunday, 4 July. Please see the attached leaflet for a detailed programme of the day.

Thank you very much for your time and hope to see you at festival activities.

In Solidarity,



Taylan Sahbaz

Centre Coordinator

Hackney Unites its residents!

On Saturday 5 June 2010 some four hundred Hackney residents attended Stoke Newington School as part of the Hackney Unites Celebrate Hackney! Event.

Hackney Unites is a local group with members coming from the diverse range of community sectors. People have dedicated their time and effort to the project since October last year.

The aim of the event was to celebrate Hackney and everything the borough has achieved to date, while at the same time act as a catalyst to link local businesses and community organisations together so that they could work in the interest of local people.

The day was a success with stalls occupied by a range of community based businesses and voluntary organisations such as Open University, Hackney Migrant Centre, HCVS and the Community Empowerment Network. A range of food was on sale – sponsored by local business. One of the major highlights was the first ‘Hackney shorts film festival’ – so aptly named to reflect the range of short films shown throughout the day.

There were some fifteen workshops - all looking at issues that affect Hackney residents, community groups and businesses. The penultimate session on the day covered five key topics: young people and their needs, the struggles against racism and the need to build an effective campaign, the wider concerns with peace and war, community organisation and the need to work collaboratively with other community groups and the workers advice sessions – where community members could obtain basic advice on how to enforce their employment rights in the work place.

Under the coalition Conservative/Lib Dem government there are likely to be major changes to community groups with budget cuts affecting the services they provide. Speaker Andy Benson from the National Coalition for Independence Action detailed some of the impacts these changes may have, such as government becoming directly involved in organisations – affecting their autonomy and their ability to be impartial in the community work they do. Maurice Glassman discussed the work of London Citizens, a local group. Wendy Pettifor galloped though the recent cost cutting measures within the Law Society with the net effect that people in need of legal advice and support are unable to access it. Cathy Reay from Hackney Housing Group explained how their actions are about empowering individual tenants to engage with the processes to improve the quality of their accommodation. Finally Liz Hughes from Haggerston Pool Community Trust detailed their on going battle with the Hackney Council to keep a swimming pool within their local community.

The closing session was facilitated by John Page, secetary of Hackney Unites where initial feedback was extremely positive on the day’s events. I came away with an awareness that the pending cuts to Hackney’s local services will have an unquantifiable impact on Hackney residents and businesses.

By Mz Lashmore

Community Justice -A personal View by Teena Lashmore

The UK's current prison population has topped over 84,000 people. While the debate rages on about being tough on crime, little is heard of recent changes to one of the key stakeholders involved in managing crime and diverting offenders away from criminal behaviours: probation.

As of April 2010 the Probation Service became a Probation Trust. Criminal justice services will now be delivered locally - mirroring the boundaries of Local Authorities. The change is designed to allow Probation to 'commission services' with other public and/or third sector organisations or voluntary agencies such as educational services and training providers. Links that help reduce further offending.

For people in Hackney, these fundamental changes in the criminal justice process create the possibility of a shift of emphasis towards community justice. This change has seen little political debate, or discussion on what it means (or could mean) for our communities. Anti-social and criminal behavior affects local communities and it is hoped that these changes in the Probation service will ensure offenders sentenced to community sentences will 'pay-back' locally to their communities for their offending.

If these changes are to be successful then the communities of Hackney need to participate in the process; for example, nominating meaningful and useful projects for offenders to undertake as part of their punishment. Meanwhile, community groups that seek to divert young people from offending will need to gear up for the inevitable changes in funding arrangements.

As communities we will need to find ways to participate in local crime reduction partnerships so that the crime strategy for Hackney is focused locally. We can achieve different outcomes by diverting young people away from criminal behavior by breaking the patterns that exist in poor education, social exclusion, lack of employment and training and offending.

Community and restorative justice can be an effective way of reducing reoffending. Perhaps we in Hackney need to discuss how our communities play a role in ensuring that the policies that are adopted are the ones that work for Hackney rather than being imposed by 'opinion formers' elsewhere.