Introducing 150 days of community in West Ealing

What do you think of West Ealing? Many of us who live here think that it’s a great place to live, work and play. But not everyone shares that perception, and that’s something that’s important to acknowledge. Here’s a sampling of some of the less pleasant tweets about our area from the past few years

It’s difficult reading isn’t it? Or perhaps you think that it’s about right, or at least that there is a grain of truth. Maybe there is, maybe there isn’t. With these negatives in mind, we’ve resolved to create a new project – starting today – and we want you to get involved. We call it 150 days of community in West Ealing.

You don’t need to do anything you don’t normally do, in order to join in. We just want you to share your acts of community and kindness over the next four or five months with us. All the things that make you smile!

A bit like Facebook, the idea is  just to share certain things with your neighbours. These are the things we might count as ‘building social capital’ – but we often take for granted as ‘just life’.

You can share, via images, videos, text, twitter, Facebook, email, blog. A few words, a story, a picture or a video clip, a useful link, is all that’s needed. You might be recording something momentous or something very ordinary, something that happened to you or something that you witnessed.

We’re defining our area quite loosely – anything that happens in West Ealing and its ‘borders’ – Ealing Broadway, Hanwell, Pitshanger, Northfields, South Ealing. We’d love to hear from all of you!

To inspire you’ve we’ve created a non-definitive list of ideas for things that create ‘social capital’. We’ve already got 150+ ideas, and there are seven a week that you can use to inspire you. You don’t have to do all of them in any given week, or any of them – you can even skip ahead and do some of the other 143! You can also send in uncategorised ‘evidence’, too and we’ll tag it and organise it.

We’ll summarise contributions weekly and suggest the next seven topics.

By the end, we’ll have all of your contributions in a great big online list, so that we can all see the great things that we do and, even more importantly, can do, in and around West Ealing.

This project is loosely based on the work of Robert Putnam (author of ‘Bowling Alone‘) on social capital.

West Ealing Neighbours wants to create the antidote to the impression that we sometimes have that people think West Ealing is a dump.

So, neighbours, we’ve got 150 days to make a collection of evidence that proves the naysayers wrong – can we do it?

Our suggestions for Week 1 – week beginning 14 February

• Smile at a neighbour
• Organise a social gathering to welcome a new neighbour
• Go to a local social event
• Go to the local pop-up shop
• Register to vote
• Support a town meeting
• Post something supportive on a social media site

Ways to send in your contributions:

Send us an email – 150daysofcommunity@gmail.com
Write on our Facebook wall – https://www.facebook.com/groups/124290860921562/ 
Tweet at us – @WENeighbours
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