The Story So Far

Children and young people from Beech Hill Primary school worked alongside Media Cubs to explore what community meant to them and learn new skills in journalism at the same time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eG3UZ9QC-cE&feature=youtu.be

The Thursday morning social space found a new home in the Hub at Beech Hill Primary school

Sunday 7th May saw neighbours getting together for Picnic in the Park to have a good time together and celebrate the coronation, thanks to a successful Ey Up – Let’s Party bid to Awards for All. Around 250-300 people joined in and a thoroughly good time was had by all, with so many people commenting about how great it was to see the park so well used. This was the second party in this park, with the first being organised last May. It was great to see how both the number of organisers and the number of people attending had grown.

On March 29th 2023 we hosted the first community led Afternoon Tea.  After a visit to a similar event in Netherton a group of women got together and brought food, fun and afternoon dancing to the community.  We are sure this will be the first of many! Thanks to Lisa, Sam, Sandra, Sonya and Vicky for organising.

We recently made a number of Brighter borough applications that were all approved!

£500 towards the Community party on the 13th May
£300 for the Dog Show Group to refill poo bags for a further 6 months
£200 to St Anne’s Garden Group for mulch, seeds and hand tools
£150 to well good social organisers for the Afternoon Tea to pay for the cost of the entertainer.
And a whopping £6,000 towards levelling the land in Diggle St Park to create a safer and more open space.
Looking forward to seeing the benefits in the neighbourhood.

Some readers in the community have joined together to start a new book club! So far it’s the 2nd Friday of the Month, held at Bookcycle Beech Hill – please check the events page for future updates.

We had a great night at the cash and chips in November. We spent £800 between us on great community ideas. Sandra and friends went home with £150 for an elf-based Christmas party at St Andrew’s, so keep your eyes peeled for the invite. Phil Beswick bagged £250 to grow his recycling bikes idea. He wants every child in the area to own a bike and get men involved in repairing and fixing bikes.  The money will be spent on bike spare parts and promotion. We also allocated £400 to pay for two more dog poo bag dispensers and a year’s supply of bags. 

Throughout the summer, neighbours nominated neighbours for Community Superstar awards and we held our first community awards ceremony in September.  It was a great evening you can read more about who was nominated and why here and watch the video that captured our special evening. 

The annual Springfield Dog Show was held in August. We had new sponsors and a bigger-than-ever raffle! This year we raised £360 and the community can decide together how to spend it. We will add the funds to the Vocal Eyes pot so that everyone can see how money is spent, and more importantly, get involved in making the decisions. Read more about the day and our furry dog show winners here

We all know that children and young people spent far too much time indoors during the pandemic and were discouraged from playing games together for fear of spreading the virus. For some small children, they are growing up believing this is normal. Play for Play’s sake is the antidote to that, bringing play back into the heart of communities. 3 community places on three afternoons throughout the month of August. This started in 2022. Will it become a tradition? Read more about it soon.

We started to use Vocal Eyes as a platform to enable the community to grow ideas and make more decisions together. We have a pot of £2000. You can get involved by joining the platform here

Well Good Socials started in May 2022. They are places were people can come together to enjoy each other’s company. They take place on Thursday mornings from 9-12 in the function room at the Wellfield Hotel. You can find out more about them here

With a bit of help from Awards for All, Megan and friends planned a brilliant Jubilee Party at Diggle St / Margaret St Park. You can read more about this soon.

The group of women who had worked together to create Kerri’s story hosted viewings in the community to find out what other women thought about it. If you’d like to listen to this or find out more about Kerri’s story, you can get in touch here or find out more here soon.

Whilst the pantry was open, we’d created a space for people to share a brew and a biscuit together. A group of men started to meet. When the pantry closed the local pub the Hen Hole, offered the group a space. Women do attend too. If you fancy a chat on a Monday afternoon this could be for you.

Sadly, it was time to close the pantry. The premises that we were using meant that we could only offer dry goods and we were beginning to have to buy items to top up the shop. Customer numbers were falling too when shops reopened. We were really thankful to all the community members who made this happen and all those who supported it too.

One of our neighbours is part of Give it a Grow Wigan which emerged out of the pandemic. Victoria has taken the community garden at St Anne’s under her wing and hosts monthly gardening sessions on the last Sunday of the Month from 12pm. You can read more about it here or join in.

We wanted to see a community full of street parties and offered little bits of cash to help parties grow, although people seemed to prefer the idea of a big community party and/or keeping their street parties under the radar so they didn’t get bogged down in red tape.

We managed to secure some more money from Awards for All to spread a bit of joy. We need it after the last couple of years. This cash was to help plan jubilee parties,  Summer play and generally make things happen. Or even bring people together to make each other smile. Megan was the first joy spreader and planned the jubilee party. The baton was then handed over to Sandra, Sammi, Lisa and Laura who planned the summer play programme.

We’ve been keen to support local businesses and encourage local people to shop locally. We tested out the idea of a maker’s market and we were amazed at how many people came along. 

Coming together at International Women’s Day has now become a tradition in the community. In 2022, we celebrated with a Food Share and a Relax and Reconnect Day for women and girls. These have continued to happen monthly. You can find the dates in the events section.

The committee who organise the mutual aid went to My Life in Standish and spent some time thinking about the kind of community they would like to live in 10 years time. How they would like the area to be for their children and grandchildren. What do you think about their ideas? You can put your ideas forward here

Care Choice North West had been supporting the pantry for a while and so it was no surprise that they worked in partnership with us to offer a Christmas Meal at St Andrew’s Community Centre. A great time was had by all. The meal was supported too with monies from our local councillors – Steve & Phyll. 

We were very aware of the number of people who lost their life to suicide during the lockdown. In Wigan, we have terribly high levels of life lost to suicide. We thought that it might help if we could talk about it more and also offer some support to those who have lost someone to suicide. So we worked with Church Wigan, the Samaritans and Wigan Community Choir to offer a Service of Light. 

Forever Manchester kindly provided us with some cash to keep the pantry going. We needed to contribute to the heating costs at the Scout Hut. We were also able to donate £150 to Ekhaya Empowerment CiC who were able to use the funds to provide 6 culturally relevant hampers for local families.

Thanks to the hard work of Emma and Gill, the group became a Coop cause. This meant that a penny in every pound that was spent at the Co-op could be donated to raise cash for sheltered seating at the community garden. Read more about how your spend at Co Op can help us

We started to come together to talk about things that concerned us. One of the local Cllrs helped us out, but we got stuck waiting for statistics from the Council, so we went back to focus on what we care about. We’ve noticed that when doing that, the things that we are concerned about often decrease.

We premiered the Community Film at the first Annual General Meeting for the Committee.

When out and about chatting to people in parks, we realised that people love their dogs. We also learned that lots of people were annoyed about the amount of dog poo in the community. We put the two together and created the Springfield Dog Show. All monies raised were used to purchase dog poo bag dispensers and a year’s supply of spare poo bags. £273 was raised in total. The group has used its own funds to bridge the gap as we’ve spent a total of £600 on poo bags since the last dog show. There’s definitely less mess on the streets though and in the parks. 100s of people came on the night. You can read more about the dog show here.

We eventually managed to host the Garden Party so that we could eat some of James’s cake together. It was worth waiting for.

We were delighted when Forever Manchester approved our application for garden furniture at St Anne’s Community garden.

When the weather started brightening and the lockdown rules were easing, it was lovely to invite pantry customers to stay around for a cup of tea and a chat.

We wanted to make sure that we always remembered the way in which the community came together during the pandemic and so we managed to get a little bit of cash to pay for a short film. You can watch it here. It will bring a tear to your eye and a smile to your face. The work started over the summer and we held a premiere at the first annual general meeting in October.

After chatting with people locally about domestic abuse, we created a group called We Hear You and invited local people to join it.

We also started to think about how we might organise locally. We invited a clerk of a Parish Council to come and talk to us about how they work. We weren’t sure if local people would agree to a levy. What do you think?

Springfield Sonnets was a little poetry group that grew out of the activities held to celebrate International Women’s Day. This is one of the poems that the women created together.

We were able to use all the gifts, skills and passions that we have in the community to create a brilliant weekend of fun for International Women’s Day. We cooked pancakes together, sang, wrote poetry, made masks and learned about creating bee-friendly spaces. 9 women shared their gifts and skills with the community, 8 of whom were local and 1019 people joined in. You can read more about it soon.

We made a successful application to Awards for All. We secured £1950. This enabled us to buy some chairs so that we could create little sit and chat areas when it was safe to be back together; host lots of activities for International Women’s Day and provide craft activity packs.

During lockdown, people who experienced domestic abuse were even more at risk. In Wigan, the statistics are terrible. We wanted to do something about this. We want to live in a community that is safe, where people look after each other. And, if we need services, then they are the best they can be. We managed to secure a little bit of cash to create a safe space to begin talking about this together.

We reached 1000 Facebook members. Amazing!

As we started to come out of lockdown and furlough ended, we noticed that redundancies began to increase, and people were struggling. We fundraised together and created the neighbour fund. Small cash discrete gifts of £20-50 to help with an unexpected bill or an extra Christmas present. We noticed that giving and sharing increased massively through the Facebook group when this started. We thought that most people who were struggling would prefer to buy their own gifts.

One of the things that we discovered when talking to local people online and on the street was that many people in the community were passionate about food waste and food poverty. We brought people who were interested together online and decided to create a food pantry. Wigan Council gave us a little cash to set it up. We paid Fur Clemt to be a member, and we bought the food from them. The Scouts offered the use of the scout hut. The food pantry opened in November; we called it Scouting for Food, and here are the first customers.

As the Facebook group began to grow, we began to chat about what type of group we wanted to be. In the run-up to Christmas, there were more and more posts from people wanting to sell items. We had a chat and a vote about it. We didn’t want to become a selling site; we felt there were enough of those. We decided that we would sell to each other once a week only. The Midweek Market was born.

The number of Covid cases began to rise. We knew that the garden party would have to wait. We used the crowdfunding money and hosted a bulb planting day. We planted flowers of remembrance for those we had lost and been unable to say a proper goodbye to and flowers of hope for Spring when hopefully we could all be together again.

We created a Facebook group for the garden community so that people could share ideas and jobs, plan planting and arrange meetups. 

We began to raise money together to buy things that we would need for the garden. £250 was our first target and we achieved that in no time at all.

A few people started to gather in the community garden to bring it back to life, as it was generally quite overgrown. We found people who had been working in the garden for years and helped them. We learned about the history of the garden and how barefooted Rev Roger had initially created the garden as a sanctuary for people seeking asylum in Beech Hill.

When we could meet outside in groups of 6, we took chairs and sat outside the post office, saying hello to people and asking about what they might like to do together. Here, we met James, who offered to make cakes for us. The idea of bringing the community garden at St Anne’s back to life so that we could eat cake together in peace was sparked here.

When it became a little safer to be outside, and we could be together in small groups, we started to offer walks together. It helped women to feel safer as the streets were still very quiet.

We were keen to support local businesses and keep our money flowing around the area, rather than leaking out. We created Small Business Sunday on the Facebook group to cheer on local businesses and provide some free advertising – this still runs every Sunday.

We knew that not everyone was online and used our daily walks to say hello and have a short chat with other people either in the street, over the garden wall or through the window. We encouraged people to smile at whoever they passed in the street.

We started to bring people together online. We had coffee mornings and mindfulness sessions. We started treasure mapping too. Discovering the gifts, skills and passions of local people. Finding out what they cared enough about to act upon. The idea for bringing the garden back to life and the food pantry started here

We invited neighbours to get involved in helping people who might not live in their street. People could help with shopping and prescriptions or by becoming sheltering friends and keeping each other company. We also made sure that people knew how to contact the Council and help in other ways.

We carried on inviting streets to connect with each other and connected 112 streets with Whatsapp groups. We encouraged groups to reach out to other people on their street who may not use WhatsApp to see what skills they had to share or what help they might need. We created a Whatsapp group for the street champions. This was very active during the lockdown.

As some streets got to know each other, they began to help each other out and share skills. Cook for each other, shop for each other, even sing together. It wasn’t the same on every street, though. Many people were really lonely and isolated. We organised online meetings to discover what we might like to do together.

The local Council Area Manager told us that we had low referrals for crisis support because of the way we were coming together and supporting each other.