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5800 Copies of The RiverView Issue #2

Have you received your 2nd issue of The RiverView (formally known as Riverside News)? The resident editorial board worked incredibly hard with support from Social Spider CIC to publish this issue showcasing local community groups, resident opinion pieces and exciting updates about the development.

We delivered approximately 5,800 copies to residents in Thames View, Barking Riverside and Scrattons Farm. A further 300 copies will also be shared in community hubs across the Ward including the Sue Bramley Centre, Rivergate Centre and the Wilds Ecology Centre.

As a resident-led newspaper it is important to champion resident voice and to represent the diversity of the community we are in. The REB are grateful for the many submissions received and have already started to receive for the upcoming issue. They would love to encourage everyone to feel free to submit story ideas and to build on the amazing stories that have been published.

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What's next?

The resident editorial board have completed training with the Social Spider CIC and will be producing future publications with the continued support from TWCP.

Community groups are also being invited to support future distribution of the publication to collaborate and build our community voice.

For more information on future publications click here

Thames View Playing Fields receives goal posts and pitch lines

Thames View Playing Fields finally receives goal posts and pitch lines!

TWCP works alongside other community groups and its delivery partner Creative Wellness who were really keen to improve the surface of the site. After delivering successful girls football sessions via the Barking Sports For Change Coalition supported by Nike, the GLA and Laureus Sport, there were issues finding the group an appropriate, accessible and affordable space for this activity to continue to take place locally. Having run a number of successful sessions on the Thames View Playing Fields in the summer of 2021 the group needed to find a playing surface that was levelled, marked out with proper goals for their sessions to be able to continue.

TWCP began to explore the possibility of improving the surface of the Thames View Playing Fields to increase the organised sport that could take place there.

Previously exploring a number of different options which all seemed to present barriers that were impossible to overcome be it due to cost, availability or lack of clarity over who owned and operated the space and could give permission. We are happy that the site has now been made fit for community sport groups to use.

Wellbeing Navigators Receives £10K Funding

The Wellbeing Navigators Programme recently received £10k from LBBD’s connect fund to run events that combat social isolation in Thames Ward. Other groups given the funding include Company Drinks, Ultimate Counselling Services, Future Molds, Harmony House, and Rights Development Services. They will be using the fund to expand their existing services as well as putting on new exciting events: such as Company Drinks who will be creating a ‘queer (LGBTQ+) garden’, reminiscent garden (for the OAPs) and others. Harmony house will be using the funding to give their workers more quality time with each contact, getting them the person centred help they require.

Wellbeing Navigators will be using the money to run new additional events that residents want: such as gardening, arts, sports and wellness groups. We chose these activities as a way to give residents a positive focus, to take our minds off our post lockdown worries and on to something positive and life affirming. To ground our thoughts back to our neighbourhood and the people in it – reconnecting us with our community.

During these activities, residents will be able to chat to wellbeing navigators in a relaxed setting about further wellness options and services.

We are still offering residents an amazing free resident to resident, 1-2-1 support through warm conversations with motivational interviewing and signposting to other fun activities and helpful services.

For more information email Alex@twcp.org.uk

Young People Meet with Cllr Achilleos to Campaign for Food Waste Collection

Young people have an excellent way of speaking the truth, even the uncomfortable ones. This is never truer than when it comes to issues of looking after our planet and taking seriously the damage our current lifestyles are having. The local newspaper, the RiverView, featured an interview with Leo about food waste and the lack of it in Barking & Dagenham. Leo wanted to do something about it.

Since then, it has been exciting to link up with the Young Citizen Action Group at Riverside School and with others at Leo’s own school, George Carey Primary School to turn words into action. The young people met Councillor Achilleos, who is the Green Champion in the Borough to take this further.

Erik was one of the young people leading the discussion. He shared:

“After hearing about Leo’s food waste campaign, I felt inspired and encouraged to join his project in order to make a change. During the meeting with Cllr Achilleos we asked him if we could have a food waste collection system across the entire borough and have food waste bins and biodegradable bags provided for free.”

Everyone was pleased to hear that food waste is already high on the council agenda, and they are exploring how to implement this for residents next year. Leo reflected after the meeting, “I felt nervous in the beginning, but the Councillor was kind and very polite, when he said they would do it in 2023 it felt really good and I was excited!”

Councillor Achilleos shared: “It was great to meet with young people from Riverside and George Carey Schools to discuss food waste recently. Their initiative, enthusiasm, and engagement with the issue filled me with hope that we can overcome the challenges, to deliver a food waste service and a carbon neutral future for Barking and Dagenham. Young voices have proved particularly powerful in the climate debate, and I will be working hard to ensure those voices are heard as we work towards our goal of net-zero by 2030.”

So, progress is being made, and that leaves the question of what next? It is great that the council is hoping to bring food recycling to every home next year, for free. The young people continue to watch this to make sure it happens. There is a role each of us can play too, not only to recycle our food waste when the bins arrive, but we can reduce our own food waste today. These young people are committed to keep working for a greener future and working with our schools to do that. Did you know, 30% of the food we buy goes in the bin? We can change that by only buying what we need, saving not only waste but money too – what’s not to love!

Residents join forces to bring back Ripple Nature Reserve

A resident-led group has formed to help the council bring the Ripple Nature Reserve back into use after many years of the site being inaccessible to the public. The precise details and dates are being worked out but already residents have done a successful litter pick drawing on the energy and expertise of the Roding Rubbish Group and a steering group is in place to plan, fundraise and support the return of a well-managed and much needed environmental and community resource returning to its former glory.

During the pandemic, Londoners took to their parks and green spaces as never before. Assets that had always been there but perhaps not always fully accessed or appreciated helped us connect with one another, safeguarded our wellbeing, and put us in touch with our environment. The Ripple Nature Reserve covers over 10 hectares spanning from the warehouses and industry of Thames Road, the HGV thoroughfare that is River Road/Renwick Road and the edges of the earliest phases of Barking Riverside. Older residents recall taking their children to enjoy the birch trees, open glades, scrub and grassland, with some veterans of Thames Ward remembering a time when the London Wildlife Trust maintained the site. The thrill of encountering this magical space has been denied newer residents, as the entrances have been locked for years. When children at Riverside School’s Young Citizen Action Group did a session on protecting the environment, the site was visible from the school window but most didn’t know it even existed, and even now they can only view it from afar.

The site adapted to the industrial legacy of the area including the dumping of pulverised fuel ash from a nearby Power Station closed in the 1980s resulting in highly alkaline soil in contrast to more acidic soil found across much of London. This has given rise to a range of plant species that would not grow elsewhere including orchids, grey club rush and wild basil as well as a haven for goldfinch, rabbits and endangered species of invertebrates.

Barking and Dagenham is blessed with many parks and open areas and yet with all the development afoot – just play spot the crane next time you are in Barking or on Riverside – green spaces and space in general is under increasing pressure. Over one hundred thousand people are set to be added to the population of the borough within the space of a few decades, many of whom will make their home south of the A13. For those living here and now and for those who will come in future years, as Riverside completes its 10,800 homes target in 2037, never was the solace of a Nature Reserve more needed.

For more details and to get involved contact nia@twcp.org.uk

Director blog April 2022 – Handwashing guidance – what to do when policies invariably fail?

1. Palm to palm.
2. Right palm over left dorsum and left palm over right dorsum.
3. Palm to palm fingers interlaced.
4. Backs of fingers to opposing palms with fingers interlocked.
5. Rotational rubbing of right thumb clasped in left palm and vice versa.
6. Rotational rubbing, backwards and forwards with clasped fingers of right-hand left palm and vice versa.

How do you wash your hands of something? Some bold ambitious policy statement that politicians make but then it fails as most public policy does. Try the above. Send out technical manuals so everyone knows what to do and can practice together.

Seriously – most public policy fails most of the time. It doesn’t achieve what it set out to do. But read evaluations and corporate communications and everything has to be a success even when it mostly isn’t. All that is solid melts into PR. Residents were listened to, communities were involved at every possible stage, and everyone is deeply happy even when they are not.

One of the questions I wonder about is why do we go along with the pretence? A kind of open conspiracy against social change. People seem strangely frozen within the institutions and communities. In Japan they say: ‘the nail that stands out gets hammered down’ and I’ve seen that response many times, close-up and personal. The standard response to community work that shifts power is to shut it down. Fear and spite is the flip-side of a paternalism and there is a lot of it about. I think it is more than that though.

My sense is many of us don’t feel it could be any different. That any kind of change is not on the agenda. Although everyone has a voice most people don’t feel they can use it. There’s a vacuum that more unscrupulous transactional people seize but only because they are allowed to.

If you don’t act, you will be acted upon. And mostly we don’t act decisively – things happen to us. Those things are for our own good – everything that happens will be attached to a policy that is always and only a stunning success. So it goes.

My solution: have an honest conversation. Ask questions and don’t accept answers. Always question answers. If something sounds too good to be true it probably is. Historically power is rarely or never given – it is taken. It is contested, argued over. It can be done amicably and lead to much better outcomes for all, but it means taking a risk.

Issue / solution / action

The only way to break free from policy failure is to keep asking questions. Questions pinpoint issues. These issues become an agenda and an action plan. Having a plan and working that plan is about developing and testing solutions and taking action, over and over again. If you want change you have to take action and not leave it to others who have great PR but a disappointing track record. Part of our task is also to create the spaces where people can grow in confidence and self-belief to take collective action, to learn and work together in more authentic partnership.

But it only works if you ask questions. You have to question if the person in control really knows what they are doing, if the policy is really working, you have to be willing to disrupt the present to claim the future. Next time you go to a meeting give it a go.

Matthew Scott

TWCP Director

Inside TWCP: A Voice for the People – Romeo Murisa

Thames Ward Community Project represents an opportunity to give a voice for the people, by the people. The events held by them does more than communicate to building connections as it tackles challenges in a unique and impactful way with the aim to find a solution to the root cause of how the community feels.

I first got involved with TWCP by sharing a poem about mental health. The aim of the event was to help connect local residents and help facilitate conversations on the importance of social connection and the promotion of good mental health and wellbeing. This enabled me to share my talents and craft of spoken word, to help create impactful and meaningful conversations within our community. As a local resident, this was a space that contained individuals who share similar views to me but with a deep understanding of our lived experience. Hence, when an opportunity to be involved in the Arts and Culture Action Group with TWCP was presented, I was honoured to be given a chance to give back to the community. To give back through one of the most beautiful and readily available arts, known as spoken word. During this journey of working with the amazing team at TWCP, we have been able to achieve a milestone of creating an event for Black History month, which fused a vibrant palette of music, art, and spoken word. It was great to have written a piece for this to create conversations and hear the audience’s perspective.

As well as this, I have been involved in the fire safety action by writing three unique pieces that I have shared with the members and residents alongside the British Red Cross and the London Fire Brigade, to spark change and highlight our action points. I am excited for the end result for this one as it will help not only our community, but other communities that are at risk due to the lack of fire safety plans being put to action.

My plan for this year is to host writing workshops to allow everyone in our community to gain the ability to put what’s on their minds and heart to paper, because what is written is never forgotten. My ultimate vision is to support local residents that have a passion and talent for spoken word to gain their voice so that their stories can be heard.

Romeo Murisa

Member of the TWCP Arts & Culture Citizen Action Group

Director blog March 2022 – The Body Keeps the Score

Trauma underpins our lives and our communities; it is hard to talk about and often talking doesn’t help, who wants to relive such things, but we carry it in our bodies and reproduce it in our behaviours anyway. That’s what I mean by ‘the body keeps the score’. We are lucky if we get through life without distressing experiences that injure us physically and emotionally. If we don’t experience it ourselves, we’ll know others close to us who have.

We carry it in our bodies, but we also carry it in everything we do. It strikes me that community work and so-called ‘partnership’ working that seeks to address positive change, as opposed to maintaining existing inequality and power relationships, needs to exercise more care, because change is painful and is resisted.

Trauma informed practice has six simple principles which if acted on would help:

Safety
Trustworthiness and transparency
Peer support
Collaboration and mutuality
Empowerment and choice

Cultural, historical and gender issues

I don’t think our community and partnership spaces are always safe, trustworthy, transparent. Or that we have each other’s backs often enough (peer support). We compete rather than collaborate. There is compulsion in the workplace, not choice and we don’t talk about race, gender, class and other oppressions. Sometimes we create spaces for the above but not often enough. Because we live in the world as it is, not the world as it should be.

Over lockdown I found myself thinking a lot about the world as it should be.

I was thinking about the pain in our lives and how it is telling us something. It can be redemptive; we can learn from it but mostly it just hurts and then we go numb, stuck, doing the same things and getting the same results. About love and how there isn’t enough of it in the world – in the absence of love, there is survival and how simply to survive is not to live a life.

I thought about a recent situation that triggered me, where voices were raised. I don’t like being shouted at. It reminds me of a time in my life when my father would explode. He got sectioned. I remember social workers and police visiting. Questions being asked that had no answers. It just repeats. A year or so before lockdown my sister, who is autistic, got sectioned because the care home suddenly changed its staff and she literally started pulling her hair out. Social services answer was to put her into the same psychiatric hospital my dad spent time in. I then engaged with the health system my parents couldn’t cope with and it closed ranks. It reminded me that if you want change you need power; but that power without love is inhuman and love without power is anaemic, too weak.

My sister is in a good place now and even when it was going on I was surprised at how calm I felt. I’d got used to that kind of thing happening. No big deal. Broken systems and broken people; I feel too much and then I feel nothing. I see how things get frozen. I try to remember to appreciate what is precious and focus on what it is possible to change, and that makes me happy. Sometimes.

I’ve been thinking about how power is also about vulnerability. Trauma is caused when you are vulnerable and are powerless and overwhelmed so it is odd to say being vulnerable can also be powerful. How can that be?

In that space of vulnerability we are most truly ourselves and from that space we can re-imagine what is important and worth doing in our lives. A lot of the things we do are probably not worth doing – the meetings we go to – the little competitive time serving rituals that divide and rule. Anything that can give a new perspective, new space to do differently, is worthwhile because when it comes to climate change, transformational public services, local democracy, looking after each other and being more human, much of what we do isn’t working and we can do better at every level.

Matthew Scott

TWCP Director

Inside TWCP: Power to residents’ voices – Venilia Amorim

Having been an already quite active resident in the community – I joined the Barking Reach Residents Association committee as treasurer in 2016 – Tricia Zipfel, a founder and guardian of the Thames Ward Community Project, asked me and the association’s chair (Pete Mason) if we would like to be part of the interviewing process for the TWCP director’s position in the summer of 2017.

That’s when I met Matt Scott (TWCP director), back in September 2017. I posed hard questions, especially to someone who was new to the area. I wanted to make sure we got the right person for the job, someone who could establish a strong relationship with the local people, who really listened and actioned some of the brilliant ideas local residents had.

Since then I was quickly absorbed into TWCP’s steering board and never looked back.

I knew then – and I know now – that TWCP would be one of the most important projects for Barking Riverside and indeed Thames Ward as a whole. Important in developing residents’ skills, in encouraging entrepreneurship and engagement not only within the community but also with the wider stakeholders such as the council and the Barking Riverside estate developer, Barking Riverside Limited.

Living on the estate – I moved to Barking Riverside eight years ago – and in the borough (for a combined 17 years) has given me an insight of what is most important for residents: a safe and clean environment where people (young and old) can thrive culturally, financially educationally and socially.

Residents want safe and warm homes to live in, without the burden of inoperable heating systems or flammable cladding on walls. They want a consistent transport structure and shops and restaurants. Residents want a GP! One in which it doesn’t take months to get an appointment. Residents want parking spaces but want to be able to enjoy green spaces and clean air! Residents want good schools and activities for the wide diversity of residents as well as worship spaces…

Lots of wants… It’s not an easy task to be a town planner, that’s for sure! But it will be much easier with residents on board, actively making decisions on how best to shape the place they live in and will continue to live in for many years to come. I believe TWCP is a great platform for that. It has made great progress in already so many fields: arts, culture, nature, infrastructure, transport. And it will keep on going. It has and it will always have my support as a resident and as a steering group member.

My main passion is communication – I’m a journalist by trade – and I thrive in clear and open communication, ultimately by residents for the residents. This plays a hugely important part in my vision for Barking Riverside and Thames Ward: a place that is designed and built with local residents in mind, with their wants and needs as top priority.

Venilia Amorim

TWCP Steering Group Member

Joining up Wellbeing and Community Events

The pandemic has forced many of us to become isolated but as things have opened up the importance of meeting in-person has become even clearer and pertinent to our health and wellbeing.

The Wellbeing Navigator programme is a network of local volunteers based in the community who can help residents on their health and wellbeing journey. The volunteers support local residents through signposting and referrals to community activities and have recently partnered with community groups to engage residents.

The joint Wellbeing Navigators and Roding Rubbish litter picking event on January 30th 2022, was a great opportunity for local people to experience the health benefits of outdoor community work and socialising, tackling wellness in an exceedingly positive way. People met at the skatepark in Ripple Greenway. Steven Champion from Roding Rubbish made an announcement to sum up its purpose – that simply being outside and speaking to friendly people could be a simple cure for anxiety and low mood, reaffirming the need for us all to have a community group we belong to.

As volunteers removed rubbish lodged in hedges with ‘grabbers’ next to others, they found themselves socialising with each other. There were smiles all round. Local passers-by thanked volunteers for tidying up the neighbourhood as they were on their way to the shops or walking their dogs – leaving volunteers with a real sense of doing tangible good. The whole of Ripple Greenway was visibly cleaner after the session.

Thereafter, Steven and the Wellbeing Navigators led the group to Grounded Coffee at the Wilds. On the terrace, a community group true/false game was shared, and then a social prescribing mapping game to test peoples local geography of community groups and activities. People ended the afternoon discussing the variety of groups and activities in the local area, which was a successful outcome for the Navigators, leading more local people to groups that will benefit their health and wellbeing.

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