Growing The Community

Make sure your volume is on: "...things we should be doing to connect to the community further..."

Show transcript

I think the major benefit that the community brings to the parkland is that they obviously care and value the park, and that helps direct the park management, I would say, but also particularly my role – it helps me to direct my energy so that is extremely helpful.

Because often, working with the volunteers, working with the Friends who are locals, they all live nearby, they make me think of things that we should be doing to connect with the community further.

So a great example is when the grandson of one of the Sixpenny Six - so it’s Barry Gardener’s grandson Simon – he came in really randomly with a scrapbook of newspaper cuttings from the 60’s when the Sixpenny Six took off – caught fire – and hit the headlines. And there were all these newspaper cuttings. And after that, seeing this scrapbook that we had, that inspired me and then the rest of the team to put on an exhibition in the park under the terrace celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Sixpenny Six.

And that was a brilliant day, we had 70-odd people come including the councillors, who saw the benefit of retelling this story, this historic moment of when a group of people said, “No, this is our park”. And that was inspired from a chap who lives down the road and he’s still one of our volunteers. And it is great to work with people like that. And so a constant source of inspiration for me.