Medway Eyes 👀
The eyes have landed in Luton, have you seen them?
Located behind Bowen Moto and towards Short Street Garage.
🎄 Festive Fit & Fed
You guessed it, in December we had our 2nd festive Fit & Fed thanks to the support of Medway Go and another kind donation of food items from the Morrisons in Walderslade.
Using a similar format to our programme in October, we ran for three days in the lead-up to Christmas, though this time we welcomed back Mike our community chef who each day delivered a hot delicious nutritious lunch. Despite the wet weather and no access to the school field, it was our busiest Christmas period to date with over 50 young people joining us each day to be immersed in a world of sporting and creative activities provided by Nucleus Arts, Olympia Boxing, Sport On Your Doorstep, Street Games, etc.
We were also delighted to be joined by Luton’s very own Santa Claus for the last day to bring some festive joy.
Here’s a glimpse of the fun we got up to this time around!
Rebirth of Chatham Carnival 🎭
Saturday 9th of July saw the long-waited return of the Chatham Carnival! More than 20 years in the making, we were really proud to be involved it was great to again get to speak to lots of people living in and beyond our Big Local Area.
Every Thursday in the run up to the main event, we engaged in creating carnival-themed banners, bunting and headdresses. We even created a large tree for the carnival where we would ask people to attach leaves to this tree with a message of what they liked in the area and wish to see more of.
It was a brilliant team effort, with the whole community coming together in this way. There was lots to do at this festival of fun, live music and activities for all the family – and best of all in this current cost of living crisis it was all free!
We really look forward to being involved again in next years Carnival and for many more years to come together and celebrate.
Spring Fit & Fed 🏸
Thanks to our partners and Medway Go, we were out again running Fit & Fed for two sessions a day over four days this spring half term at Luton Primary School.
February Fit & Fed 🏓
Thanks to the support of our partners, we were out running Fit & Fed again this windy and wet February half-term.
Despite the weather, we were able to continue to offer more than just multisports this time around too, as Nucleus Arts joined us again twice a day.
The icing on the cake for this half term was Mike, the community chef, who joined us on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday making nutritious quesadillas, nachos and tacos with our young people. See you all in easter 🐣
Town Hall Gardens Community Event 🏞️
On Saturday 22nd January we joined Medway Council to bring the community together to discuss improvements to Town Hall Gardens as part of the Safer Streets initiative.Read more
Fit & Fed Summer 2021 ⛹️
Thanks to our partners and Medway Go, our expanded Fit & Fed programme this summer was a huge success! Not only was there multisports this term, we had everything from kayaking to t-shirt print making, local young people took part in many engaging sporting and creative activities over the course of four weeks.Read more
Community Allotment Update 🌻
Whilst it's been all hands on deck at Fit & Fed, Hazel's been very busy at our community allotment!
Over 40 raised beds have been created to enable local people to adopt them and grow a myriad of fruit and veg without having to commit to a full sized allotment. 10 raised beds have already been adopted by local people with plans to personalise them in bold colours. There are 34 more to paint and loads of non-gardening projects in hand. Are you interested in adopting a planter? Get in touch!
In addition to these planters, we have a wildlife area, sensory garden and 4 ponds in the works, we even have a moveable apple tree that sits in a giant 1000l container and over a tonne of soil.
If you live locally and are interested in getting involved with our community allotment, please get in touch.
Community tree maintenance day! 🌲
Last month, we held a community maintenance day for our Luton Urban Trees project. We were joined by a handful of residents, pupils from Luton Primary School and Local Trust kindly sent down a fantastic photographer to capture the unfoldings.
(Picture by Andy Aitchison / Local Trust)
The day was focused around a tree worksheet (1 per tree) where everyone involved answered a series of questions .e.g how tall is the tree, what shapes are the leaves and its species.
This was a fantastic exercise to learn more about our newly planted trees and to learn how we as local people can influence positive change. This information was gathered and archived so we can monitor the changes in these trees and compare them at our next community maintenance day.
Planting trees in urban areas isn’t as simple as you might think, that’s why we held a mini-workshop on cable avoidance. It was fantastic to see local children safely finding underground utilities using the CAT4 scanner and to learn together the complexities of urban street tree planting.
Keep your eyes peeled for our next community maintenance day.
#BigLocal #Medway #Community #BetterTogether
Luton’s Urban Trees Movable Forest has landed!
Medway’s first, one-of-a-kind ‘movable forest’ has landed in a Chatham primary school, thanks to resident-led organisation Arches Local.
Working together with Medway Plus, a locally-based charity, we were successful in gaining funding in November 2019 from PostCode Local Trust for £10,000.00 together with £5,000.00 Big Local Match Funding totaling £15,000.00.
Partly due to the complications around COVID-19, we were not able to fully deliver the goals of the original Luton’s Urban Trees submission. This led to us not being able to plant as many street trees as originally planned. In March 2020, Postcode Local Trust announced that the funding we had received was considered unrestricted (with certain conditions in place).
With this announcement in mind, we developed a ‘movable forest’ concept of placing large trees in large containers that could be flexibly moved around the Luton area of Chatham. These trees were planned to be initially placed at a local primary school which has no discernible tree canopy, suffering from swathes of hard standing playgrounds.