There’s a Party on the Hill – Can you Come?

Last week we hosted the 2nd Springfield, Beech Hill and Gidlow CommUnity Awards.

It’s such a beautiful evening. To bring people together who are offering acts of care to and in the community on an every day basis. Often small acts too. There’s always such humility in the room, and an air of ‘I’m not worthy’ to start with. As the evening progresses it shifts to collective joy, shared pride and you can really feel the community spirit in the room.

You can read more about the awards event here.

The awards are such a great community building tool too. Last year it’s fair to say that behind the scenes Gill and I did a bit of orchestrating, making sure that people who needed to meet each other and hear about each other were in the room. We did more than our fair share of nominating, if the truth be known.

We’ve been so chuffed to see what happened when we connected the connectors last year and how much has rippled and grown from the evening of celebration. We knew it would though as we’d been inspired by the people at Firs Bromford some years ago, and we saw what happened there.

We were even more chuffed that we didn’t need to orchestrate nominations this year. In fact, we hardly submitted any. The people who were nominated last year took good care of that.

So you could say we’ve gone deeper – the layer of the most visible connectors have invited in more connectors. There was most definitely a wider breadth of people in the room this time, probably in some respect due to the deep work of building and growing rooted relationships over the last year. 

It was a joy to see so many more young people nominated and a joy too to see some of the connectors who’ve been growing their work getting multiple nominations this year.

So whilst it’s deepened, there’s widening to do. As I sat in the room on Thursday, the whiteness was clear and no longer reflects the community we live in.

We did this year have a nomination from a woman of colour, new to the area, thanking someone for the welcome they received. We’ve started to build relationships on the door step and at the coffee morning, but the relationships are still in their infancy and not strong enough to feel like the awards event was for them. And we need to steer clear of tokenism. 

I suppose the relationships are now strong enough in the groups to talk about whiteness and that’s led to group members beginning to strike up conversations with people who are new to living in their streets – to offer a welcome, an invite in to share and exchange gifts, skills and talents and enrich community life.

The playbox too has opened up some doors and conversations with women new to the area and with families with young people who are transitioning.

So it’s back to learning conversations for us, to street work, to really targeted work as it’s really not all right to be all white, or all hetro.

Building community at the speed of trust and from the inside out. Always asking, ‘who’s not here?’ and creating the conditions for welcome.

We love how celebration is such a great way to enable strangers to become acquainted. And the celebration too is a good measure of the warmth of welcome that all who live here feel.

Whilst we celebrate whenever we can, we know there’s much more to do. Always.