People who live near or use South Street in Isleworth will probably know Wadih Chourey, whose brothers Joseph and Camil run the long-estabished Joseph's Patisserie opposite Isleworth Public Hall.
Wadih, aged 44, who has Down's Syndrome, has lived in the UK since 1997 when he came from the Lebanon with his parents as his life was in danger from gangs who were victimising him and encouraging him to commit crime on their behalf. Since then he has been a popular local figure, undertaking simple tasks in support of the family business and enjoying the trust and sense of responsibility that this brings. He is happy, helpful and always pleasant.
His parents have both since passed away and as a result of this he faces deportation by the Home Office back to his native Lebanon. His brothers, and his many friends in the community, fear that he would be in danger if he were to be forced to return. He is not capable of living independently, needing help to wash and dress himself.
Local people believe that Chourey has been an asset to the local community, he is integrated and is a popular local figure. His removal would appear to serve no useful purpose to anybody. A campaign is underway to prevent the deportation and this campaign is fully community-led, having been initiated by the Old Isleworth Four Roads Residents' Association.
The decision is currently at the appeal stage and I would invite readers of this blog to sign our petition to say Do Not Deport Wadih Chourey.
Showing posts with label Community Action. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Community Action. Show all posts
Wednesday, 3 September 2014
Tuesday, 17 December 2013
New Group Inspires Us to Fight On
Last week saw one of the most spectacular events ever to take place in Isleworth, certainly within my living memory. An idea which had taken shape amongst a group of local people – initially, it would seem, young mothers focused around a popular local street-corner café – bloomed into a massive public display of initiative and community spirit under the banner of Inspiring Isleworth of a kind which I and my colleagues in the Independent Community Group always knew lay latent within the soul of our village. A Christmas Market, stalls, an ice rink, children's rides, a land train and much more besides turned a cold December day into a wonderful celebration of unity and togetherness. By all accounts police estimates placed the total number of people in attendance at a staggering 2,500.
The ICG as an organisation played no part in this superbly successful day, although many of our members were involved, either in a personal capacity or, in some cases, as representatives of other organisations which were involved. Had we been asked we would, of course, have been happy to have played our part, although I doubt there would have been much we could have added that the organisers did not already have firmly in hand. It was enough for us to marvel at the achievements of others, who did Isleworth so proud.
In saying all this I am not oblivious to the fact that, for a very small number of people, the object of the whole exercise appeared to be to use the event to try to raise the profile of and to promote one of the Isleworth Labour ward councillors, whose name was surreptitiously added to the event’s promotional posters against the will of many of its participants and bandied around Facebook and in letters to local newspapers. I am aware also that this councillor, to her credit, certainly did contribute a great deal to the event, if not to the extent that her small but apparently well-disciplined group of supporters would like us to believe.
But notwithstanding these strictly limited attempts to politicise and otherwise distract the occasion from its primary function, nothing must be allowed to detract from the magnitude of last week’s success. In the struggles that lie ahead for us as a community, anything which brings people out into the streets in such a spirit of harmony and mutual endeavour is something to be nurtured, and I dearly hope that this celebration will be repeated in future years.
Of course, once the party is over and the inevitable debris is cleared away, the questions which taxed us as a community before the event remain to be answered. The ongoing farce of the London Borough of Hounslow’s increasingly desperate – and, it would appear, unsuccessful – attempts to give away our Public Hall is still in full flow. The fear of library closures and “disposal” of our community buildings still returns with the approach of every new budget meeting. Traffic engineers still wreak havoc on our highways and our residents’ and tenants’ groups remain under sustained attack. The threat of aesthetically poor and unsustainable development still looms large over Brentford like a great dark cloud. Mogden still smells.
The challenge for us as community activists is to ensure that projects such as Inspiring Isleworth not only continue to be successful, but also that they serve as a compliment to our less pretty but frankly more essential campaigning work rather than being allowed, as some of our political leaders would prefer, to become a distraction from the everyday problems that affect us as a community, and a panem et circenses replacement for the struggles in which we are engaged.
After all a celebration, even a superbly crafted one of the kind we saw last week, becomes singularly redundant when there is nothing left to celebrate.
The ICG as an organisation played no part in this superbly successful day, although many of our members were involved, either in a personal capacity or, in some cases, as representatives of other organisations which were involved. Had we been asked we would, of course, have been happy to have played our part, although I doubt there would have been much we could have added that the organisers did not already have firmly in hand. It was enough for us to marvel at the achievements of others, who did Isleworth so proud.
In saying all this I am not oblivious to the fact that, for a very small number of people, the object of the whole exercise appeared to be to use the event to try to raise the profile of and to promote one of the Isleworth Labour ward councillors, whose name was surreptitiously added to the event’s promotional posters against the will of many of its participants and bandied around Facebook and in letters to local newspapers. I am aware also that this councillor, to her credit, certainly did contribute a great deal to the event, if not to the extent that her small but apparently well-disciplined group of supporters would like us to believe.
But notwithstanding these strictly limited attempts to politicise and otherwise distract the occasion from its primary function, nothing must be allowed to detract from the magnitude of last week’s success. In the struggles that lie ahead for us as a community, anything which brings people out into the streets in such a spirit of harmony and mutual endeavour is something to be nurtured, and I dearly hope that this celebration will be repeated in future years.
Of course, once the party is over and the inevitable debris is cleared away, the questions which taxed us as a community before the event remain to be answered. The ongoing farce of the London Borough of Hounslow’s increasingly desperate – and, it would appear, unsuccessful – attempts to give away our Public Hall is still in full flow. The fear of library closures and “disposal” of our community buildings still returns with the approach of every new budget meeting. Traffic engineers still wreak havoc on our highways and our residents’ and tenants’ groups remain under sustained attack. The threat of aesthetically poor and unsustainable development still looms large over Brentford like a great dark cloud. Mogden still smells.
The challenge for us as community activists is to ensure that projects such as Inspiring Isleworth not only continue to be successful, but also that they serve as a compliment to our less pretty but frankly more essential campaigning work rather than being allowed, as some of our political leaders would prefer, to become a distraction from the everyday problems that affect us as a community, and a panem et circenses replacement for the struggles in which we are engaged.
After all a celebration, even a superbly crafted one of the kind we saw last week, becomes singularly redundant when there is nothing left to celebrate.
Tuesday, 10 August 2010
Residents are increasingly setting up their own "hyperlocal" websites - should councils be worried?
By Ian Tucker and Chris Arnot
William Perrin was looking out of the window of his flat on a chilly November night when he had his "Damascene moment". About 20 young people had broken into a Renault 5 dumped in his street in King's Cross, north London, stuffed it full of fireworks, and set light to the car, which exploded as he watched on.
He called the police but they didn't come. This confirmed what he suspected: that the area wasn't heavily policed and was "almost a no-go area". At the time, a combusting car was not an exceptional occurrence, sometimes youths would even add a stolen gas cylinder for an extra explosive kick. "At that moment I thought I had a choice: either move to the suburbs like most middle-class people or get stuck into community action." He chose the latter. That was nine years ago.
A particular irritant for Perrin was the number of broken streetlights in King's Cross. One winter's evening he found 50 broken lights in his area and reported them all to the various departments of Islington council responsible. "As a result of me making a lot of fuss over the months, we were one of the first local areas to get new lights," he recalls.
Next, Perrin turned his attention to abandoned fridges. But the phoning and emailing was taking over his free time. "I wanted to find a way of co-ordinating what was going on, of exchanging information," he says. His interest in improving his local neighbourhood led to him helping with the design of FixMyStreet.com, a website built by not-for-profit company MySociety. So maybe it was only a matter of time before he struck upon blogging as the solution to solve problems at a local level, and started his own site: www.kingscrossenvironment.com. Initial posts were about abandoned mattresses and white goods, uncollected refuse and burnt-out cars. Perrin found that blogging was more effective than sending emails and phoning council departments. "An email can be like a tree falling in a forest: if you don't know an email has been sent, you don't know about it. Whereas on the web it's always there," he says.
Five years on, his site is a substantial archive of local planning campaigns, environment issues, crime and antisocial behaviour – as well as information about new local shops and cafés.
Perrin found that, over time, a different local audience began to contribute. "This was partly due to the demographic changes happening in King's Cross, but also because previously people had found civic action too hard to engage with. Attending evening meetings, reading stacks of papers, listening to people talking in a Latinate language for several hours feels totally alien to modern values," he says. "The site gives a 21st century interface to a 19th century system. People have got involved because the time cost to them is so much less."
The website gets 400 to 500 views a day, has a network of 20 local people who send in local information, and a handful of core volunteers who do most of the blogging.
A year or so after starting the site, specific campaigns were beginning to dominate, and some campaigners wanted to set up breakaway sites. Perrin, who has never written a line of computing code, says people didn't realise how easy it is to set up a website. He produced a simple six-page guide to help.
In June last year, during a year-long sabbatical from the civil service, where he works as a government policy adviser, he set up TalkAboutLocal (talkabout local.org), which aims to give people across the UK a powerful online voice on community issues. "We want to help people communicate and campaign more effectively to influence events in the places in which they live, work or play," says the website.
Perrin, with funding from Channel 4's 4iP project and Screen West Midlands, employs two staff and some freelancers who train people at UK Online centres to teach aspiring local bloggers. As a result, dozens of hyperlocal sites are up and running, including by communities in Florence in Stoke-on-Trent (florencera.org.uk), Kington in Herefordshire (kingtonblackboard.org) and Heeley in Sheffield (heeleyonline.wordpress.com).
Perrin's work with TalkAboutLocal earned him a place at Downing Street's table last month, at a seminar on the coalition's "big society" plans. Perrin says he is "quite optimistic" about the concept. "One of the greatest prizes is a massive increase in civic action and people taking responsibility for working with public services in their neighbourhood instead of having public services do things to you," he says.
In King's Cross, he believes that local residents are more likely to get things changed than in another ward in the borough. "That's because what we have created through community action, through sheer hard work, is a very effective campaigning network," he says.
He admits, however, that a website on its own won't magically transform a neighbourhood. "But a neighbourhood that already has some effective social capital can benefit from having some sort of web resource that helps people network, understand what's going on locally and project their voices beyond the immediate physical boundaries of their estate or village," he says.
The question for local government is how it chooses to engage with these sites. Once a site begins to grow in popularity and is campaigning on local issues, should the council have a formal relationship with it – should it consult with it in the same way as it would a residents' association, for example? "The challenge for people who run councils is to respond to modern communications values. To make democracy respond as if it was any other modern good or service," says Perrin.
The Leadership Centre for Local Government has, with the Improvement and Development Agency, produced a guide and website (socialmedia.21st.cc) for councillors on how to use social media. Joe Simpson, director of politics and partnerships, says the question for councils is how do they move from communicating with their residents to having a conversation.
"Local authorities are at the beginning of that journey," he says. "We can't hide behind the facade that we're the professionals and can tell people what to do. The vast majority of people don't expect to get everything they ask for, but they want to know their views have been heard and understood. The key issue is going to be cuts. If people feel we are listening to their concerns we will get some buy-in."
In Birmingham, the council has so far failed this test, according to Stef Lewandowski. His website (bccdiy.com) set out to simplify and enhance the city council's new website unveiled last year. Lewandowski discovered through a freedom of information request that the cost of the city council's website was £2.8m. "We thought the figure was rather a lot," he says, "especially as the process for paying your council tax was nothing short of labyrinthine."
After he believed that his concerns were rather airily dismissed by a councillor at a public meeting, Lewandowski sat down the following morning and began downloading the site on to his laptop. The download took three hours.
Transforming the site into something that he regarded as more user-friendly entailed involving as many potential users as possible. He staged a Hack Day at Moseley Exchange, a cross between a community centre and a co-working space. More than 60 people turned up, including students and pensioners as well as computer programmers.
"Above all, there was a requirement for really fast access to the services that people need – bin collection times, for instance, and the opening times of your local library. So I built in a facility called 'Near me'. You tap in your postcode and find a page of useful services and events in your immediate neighbourhood."
Tap in the postcode B31 2LP on bccdiy.com and it reveals that a street lamp is out of order. "Again," it says. There is a map pinpointing the offending light, along with the date and time of a complaint by a woman who writes that her husband has just undergone a knee operation and had to use a torch to avoid broken paving slabs. From other postings we learn the exact location of potholes in roads – some fixed, some not – and the dumping of a shopping trolley in a pond. There is a list of planning applications, many of which will elicit instant objections.
"I like the idea of holding power to account, getting people more involved with decision-making in their area and making them feel part of the process, not separate from it," says Lewandowski.
Birmingham city council declined to comment on bccdiy.com but a spokesman pointed out that the £2.8m figure was for more than revamping the website. It covered a larger remit that he claimed had massively improved the council's relationship with residents – face-to-face, by phone and via the web.
Having taken on Birmingham council, Lewandowski is engaged in providing a similar service for every other council taxpayer in the country through diycouncil.com, which he built by downloading the contents of another site and adding content based on his work with bccdiy.com.
"In just a few hours – so far I've spent 20 hours on the diycouncil.com site – someone can make very interesting things happen with these tools. And with the coming push to have all public sector data in the public domain, we're going to see some innovative, surprising and exciting things being done very quickly outside the usual tender/commission/report cycle that the public sector is used to," he says.
"What comes next is that we collectively find ways to make that data meaningful to people in unexpected ways, some of which will work, many of which will fall by the wayside," says Lewandowski. "But the end result will be a smoother interaction between people and government. At least that's my hope."
Reproduced with acknowledgements to The Guardian.
William Perrin was looking out of the window of his flat on a chilly November night when he had his "Damascene moment". About 20 young people had broken into a Renault 5 dumped in his street in King's Cross, north London, stuffed it full of fireworks, and set light to the car, which exploded as he watched on.
He called the police but they didn't come. This confirmed what he suspected: that the area wasn't heavily policed and was "almost a no-go area". At the time, a combusting car was not an exceptional occurrence, sometimes youths would even add a stolen gas cylinder for an extra explosive kick. "At that moment I thought I had a choice: either move to the suburbs like most middle-class people or get stuck into community action." He chose the latter. That was nine years ago.
A particular irritant for Perrin was the number of broken streetlights in King's Cross. One winter's evening he found 50 broken lights in his area and reported them all to the various departments of Islington council responsible. "As a result of me making a lot of fuss over the months, we were one of the first local areas to get new lights," he recalls.
Next, Perrin turned his attention to abandoned fridges. But the phoning and emailing was taking over his free time. "I wanted to find a way of co-ordinating what was going on, of exchanging information," he says. His interest in improving his local neighbourhood led to him helping with the design of FixMyStreet.com, a website built by not-for-profit company MySociety. So maybe it was only a matter of time before he struck upon blogging as the solution to solve problems at a local level, and started his own site: www.kingscrossenvironment.com. Initial posts were about abandoned mattresses and white goods, uncollected refuse and burnt-out cars. Perrin found that blogging was more effective than sending emails and phoning council departments. "An email can be like a tree falling in a forest: if you don't know an email has been sent, you don't know about it. Whereas on the web it's always there," he says.
Five years on, his site is a substantial archive of local planning campaigns, environment issues, crime and antisocial behaviour – as well as information about new local shops and cafés.
Perrin found that, over time, a different local audience began to contribute. "This was partly due to the demographic changes happening in King's Cross, but also because previously people had found civic action too hard to engage with. Attending evening meetings, reading stacks of papers, listening to people talking in a Latinate language for several hours feels totally alien to modern values," he says. "The site gives a 21st century interface to a 19th century system. People have got involved because the time cost to them is so much less."
The website gets 400 to 500 views a day, has a network of 20 local people who send in local information, and a handful of core volunteers who do most of the blogging.
A year or so after starting the site, specific campaigns were beginning to dominate, and some campaigners wanted to set up breakaway sites. Perrin, who has never written a line of computing code, says people didn't realise how easy it is to set up a website. He produced a simple six-page guide to help.
In June last year, during a year-long sabbatical from the civil service, where he works as a government policy adviser, he set up TalkAboutLocal (talkabout local.org), which aims to give people across the UK a powerful online voice on community issues. "We want to help people communicate and campaign more effectively to influence events in the places in which they live, work or play," says the website.
Perrin, with funding from Channel 4's 4iP project and Screen West Midlands, employs two staff and some freelancers who train people at UK Online centres to teach aspiring local bloggers. As a result, dozens of hyperlocal sites are up and running, including by communities in Florence in Stoke-on-Trent (florencera.org.uk), Kington in Herefordshire (kingtonblackboard.org) and Heeley in Sheffield (heeleyonline.wordpress.com).
Perrin's work with TalkAboutLocal earned him a place at Downing Street's table last month, at a seminar on the coalition's "big society" plans. Perrin says he is "quite optimistic" about the concept. "One of the greatest prizes is a massive increase in civic action and people taking responsibility for working with public services in their neighbourhood instead of having public services do things to you," he says.
In King's Cross, he believes that local residents are more likely to get things changed than in another ward in the borough. "That's because what we have created through community action, through sheer hard work, is a very effective campaigning network," he says.
He admits, however, that a website on its own won't magically transform a neighbourhood. "But a neighbourhood that already has some effective social capital can benefit from having some sort of web resource that helps people network, understand what's going on locally and project their voices beyond the immediate physical boundaries of their estate or village," he says.
The question for local government is how it chooses to engage with these sites. Once a site begins to grow in popularity and is campaigning on local issues, should the council have a formal relationship with it – should it consult with it in the same way as it would a residents' association, for example? "The challenge for people who run councils is to respond to modern communications values. To make democracy respond as if it was any other modern good or service," says Perrin.
The Leadership Centre for Local Government has, with the Improvement and Development Agency, produced a guide and website (socialmedia.21st.cc) for councillors on how to use social media. Joe Simpson, director of politics and partnerships, says the question for councils is how do they move from communicating with their residents to having a conversation.
"Local authorities are at the beginning of that journey," he says. "We can't hide behind the facade that we're the professionals and can tell people what to do. The vast majority of people don't expect to get everything they ask for, but they want to know their views have been heard and understood. The key issue is going to be cuts. If people feel we are listening to their concerns we will get some buy-in."
In Birmingham, the council has so far failed this test, according to Stef Lewandowski. His website (bccdiy.com) set out to simplify and enhance the city council's new website unveiled last year. Lewandowski discovered through a freedom of information request that the cost of the city council's website was £2.8m. "We thought the figure was rather a lot," he says, "especially as the process for paying your council tax was nothing short of labyrinthine."
After he believed that his concerns were rather airily dismissed by a councillor at a public meeting, Lewandowski sat down the following morning and began downloading the site on to his laptop. The download took three hours.
Transforming the site into something that he regarded as more user-friendly entailed involving as many potential users as possible. He staged a Hack Day at Moseley Exchange, a cross between a community centre and a co-working space. More than 60 people turned up, including students and pensioners as well as computer programmers.
"Above all, there was a requirement for really fast access to the services that people need – bin collection times, for instance, and the opening times of your local library. So I built in a facility called 'Near me'. You tap in your postcode and find a page of useful services and events in your immediate neighbourhood."
Tap in the postcode B31 2LP on bccdiy.com and it reveals that a street lamp is out of order. "Again," it says. There is a map pinpointing the offending light, along with the date and time of a complaint by a woman who writes that her husband has just undergone a knee operation and had to use a torch to avoid broken paving slabs. From other postings we learn the exact location of potholes in roads – some fixed, some not – and the dumping of a shopping trolley in a pond. There is a list of planning applications, many of which will elicit instant objections.
"I like the idea of holding power to account, getting people more involved with decision-making in their area and making them feel part of the process, not separate from it," says Lewandowski.
Birmingham city council declined to comment on bccdiy.com but a spokesman pointed out that the £2.8m figure was for more than revamping the website. It covered a larger remit that he claimed had massively improved the council's relationship with residents – face-to-face, by phone and via the web.
Having taken on Birmingham council, Lewandowski is engaged in providing a similar service for every other council taxpayer in the country through diycouncil.com, which he built by downloading the contents of another site and adding content based on his work with bccdiy.com.
"In just a few hours – so far I've spent 20 hours on the diycouncil.com site – someone can make very interesting things happen with these tools. And with the coming push to have all public sector data in the public domain, we're going to see some innovative, surprising and exciting things being done very quickly outside the usual tender/commission/report cycle that the public sector is used to," he says.
"What comes next is that we collectively find ways to make that data meaningful to people in unexpected ways, some of which will work, many of which will fall by the wayside," says Lewandowski. "But the end result will be a smoother interaction between people and government. At least that's my hope."
Reproduced with acknowledgements to The Guardian.
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