Robert Shaw School Clean Up.

A lovely day for a clean up today. All the pupils from the year 4 class came out to help out with the litter pick, assisted by local residents, some parents, a member of the Local Area team and the local Lib Dem Councillors.

A great effort by all with about 20 bags of litter and garden rubbish with a large quantity of brambles and broken twigs/branches being put in a skip. The efforts of the children and parents has almost cleared the edge of the school of the litter that has built up over the years. A few interesting items were found including an old childs bike, an angle grinder blade and an old axe.

The efforts of the Residents Association cleared old twigs and branches with a couple of the Association managing to clear a good portion including brambles. I have a few cuts from this but not as painful as the paper cut on my little finger.

The pictures show a portion of the hard work carried out by the volunteers. The subway which provides access to the school was also given a good spruce with a wheel barrow full of leaves and litter collected.

Support in the way of equipment and rubbish bags was organised by Susan Ward-Rice, one of the Neighbourhood Officers for the area and the collected rubbish was taken away by Streetscene.

During this time the Local Councillors Foster and Long put themselves to work collecting litter for the street Robert Shaw is located on and with ferreting around in hedges managed to collect a big bag full of litter.

A big thank you to everyone involved.

AGM of the Ainsley Area Tenants and Residents Association

Tonight was the AGM of the local residents association which was attended by several residents, Local Councillor Alex Foster, a member of Nottingham City Council Neighbour team and a member of Nottingham City Homes.

The previous members of the RA have seem to have dissipated except one fellow. Having seen a documentary of the BBC regarding a Grandma form London who travelled to Plymouth to try and transform an estate as she did her own was quite inspiring. It did show that people generally do still want a sense of community but are initially reluctant. This showed in the AGM when it came to voting for new members for the Residents Association as people seem to feel that it is going to go anywhere.

I thought that we can't just sit there and complain about certain things on the estate not being done if you are not willing to hold your hand up and be counted. To this end I thought I would put myself forward as Secretary and thankfully the previous member of the TRA put himself forward as Chairman. At least this will give some continuity to the proceedings.

We have a field on our estate that used to be a playing field but has become derelict and the previous TRA did a lot of initial work with regard to getting it sorted out again but unfortunately this plan was never put in to action. This is a shame as they did a lot of work with regard to the legal position and liability which is a consequence of society today. Hopefully with this work done we should be able to move forward at a good speed and at least see some results.

One problem I felt last time was there seemed little communication with the residents so a sense of community and ownership of any projects would be little forthcoming. Hopefully as a new committee we can improve this.

The next meeting is on Monday 21st April at 6.30pm.

This will give us a chance as a refreshed group to see if we can make a difference.

http://www.nottinghamcity.gov.uk/area3

http://www.nottinghamcity.gov.uk/nchl_home/getting_involved/tenant___residents_associations_.htm