Transition Town Tooting

Author: Transition Town Tooting

  • WHY A Wild Afternoon in Tooting? Part 3

    We’ve had two posts about WHY? we’re offering this urban ‘Wild Afternoon’ on Sunday (details in Events Calendar opposite).
    The first post was about making the commitment to get outside more – and enjoying the benefits of chance discovery here in Tooting. 
    The second post looked at some of the ways young people can take part in the outdoors – including examples of structured programmes.This post looks at connecting the outdoors to health & wellbeing.

    We’ll see the Project Wild Thing film on Sunday at 4pm. Another of their projects is developing information for maternity units, to help staff and mothers explore the value of being outdoors from week one: 

    Looking at all age groups, there’s a well-researched family of actions to promote wellbeing.  The ‘Five Ways to Wellbeing’ is a practical shortlist: Connect, Be Active, Take Notice, Keep Learning and Give. 
    These activities are simple things we can do in our everyday lives.
    The ‘5 Ways..’ were developed from evidence gathered in the UK government’s Foresight Project on Mental Capital and Wellbeing and published in 2008 by the New Economics Foundation.

    For example: In the second WHY? blog post we saw the young people from The Challenge group connecting with nature in a way that was new to them as they dug for potatoes; they were certainly being active, taking notice, and inquisitive about flowers and seed sowing. Yes they were learning and giving. Actions to benefit our wellbeing are simple and accessible, and outdoor opportunities are all around us.

    Here’s a great example from the National Wildflower Centre which summarises the ‘5 Ways’ as outdoor actions, and on a ‘loyalty card’:

     
    Brilliant, I wish I’d thought of this!
    It’s very neat method for reinforcing these positive actions. It makes me want to borrow this idea for the outdoor learning activities we do with Gatton School…there’s a lot to explore on just one small card.

    Come along on Sunday 22nd for a top-up of your natural 5-a-day.

    Finally: the Project Wild Thing film talks about how to ‘present’ nature to people who have lost the habit or fluency of getting into the outdoors. 
    Does nature need a local marketing campaign?
    TTT, fanSHEN Theatre, the Tooting Community Garden, the Friends of Streatham Cemetery and other partners will all help with that locally. Please join us. – Charles

  • WHY ‘A Wild Afternoon in Tooting’? Part 2

    This is the second in our mini-series of 3 blogs about ‘why’ experiencing the urban outdoors can be valuable and significant for many people….something we’ll enjoy on Sunday (see the events listing opposite) in an informal way, based on fun and games.

    This blog is just a snapshot of a big subject, looking at another way for young people to experience the outdoors: participating in structured or formal programmes aimed at a very wide range of needs and using many methods. 

    One formal programme that happens right here in Wandsworth is The Challenge National Citizenship Scheme for 15-17 year olds. Read all about it at http://www.ncsthechallenge.org/ 
    There is still time to sign up for 2015!
    Tooting Community Garden has been involved with The Challenge for the past two years, providing practical experience of a community project, in our case in the outdoors.

    The 2013 group tackled our bread wheat – threshing, sifting and then grinding into flour to be baked into Foodival sourdough. It was an active day full of energy!

    The 2014 group had a damp day moving from “Am I expected to actually touch this earth..?” to “Wow, digging potatoes is like finding buried treasure” and putting their photos on Instagram.



    That group’s feedback was expressed tangibly when they donated over £30 to the Garden – cash they had raised in another part of their course and could have easily spent on themselves. We’re grateful –  much appreciated! 

    The Youth Club run by the Klevis Kola Foundation is another local programme. Details here: http://www.kleviskola.org/projects.php
    Alongside Club activities for young people in the asylum seeking and refugee community, a group of teenagers spent a few concentrated hours in the garden in January.  

    With english as the common language (we had five more to spare)…

    …we replanted the living willow yurt, a good wintertime job, and also tied in cut sycamore branches to bend over and define the future shape of the willow structure…so that it can come alive in our imaginations even if it will take a little while to get there

    While it was great to tick off an longstanding Garden job, the problem-solving and interchange between the young men was also rewarding. And that sense of shared achievement was extended to chatting while making tea in the volcano kettle, and sharing Steph’s cake.

    A longer-term structured outdoor programme (based in Brighton):
    Young substance abusers experiencing Forest School activities right in their neighbourhood
     Quoting a project leader:
    “Young people have come to a woodland site on a weekly basis for 10 weeks, and engaged in a whole range of activities based around a campfire setting. 
    The activities have included: fire lighting skills and fire management, using edged tools to make items from natural materials – wood, fibres – and cooking over the fire.

    The strength of the programme lay in the setting, which was, on the surface, very informal. The youngsters would essentially be joining in with the staff, who happened to be in the wood and engaged in activities themselves. There was freedom to choose to do other things, sit around the fire and chat, or make up their own ideas for things to do.”

    Some outcomes?

    • The focus on the the place and the activities on offer and not on ‘self improvement’ or the addressing of ‘issues’ allowed the young people some emotional room to become self-managing, and to make the relationships they needed in a neutral environment.
    • Each young person had their own personal sense of achievement and this was sensitively recognised and encouraged by the trainers.

    If you would like to read the full case study of this Forest School project, click here. Please contact us if you would like to read the wider research project with another ten case studies.

    Thanks for reading: the possibilities for engaging local young people with the urban outdoors are very diverse, the benefits are well known, and there is creative experience to share. Informal or formal, there is a green thread in exploring how powerful the outdoors can be, and it’s useful to get that conversation going locally. 

    See you Sunday for a very informal trial run!
    – Charles

  • WHY we’re offering our ‘Wild Afternoon in Tooting’ this Sunday 22nd Feb: Part 1

    All welcome to the two parts of our free half term Wild Afternoon in Tooting:
    at 1400: participative outdoor games for all the family
    at 1600: showing ‘Project Wild Thing’ film  

    All the details on our events calendar to the right of this blog page.
    It’s going to be a fun and engaging afternoon, even if it’s damp outdoors in the first part when we try out some games.
      
    Being outdoors in the city should be fun, available and accessible, and is valuable for us all. 

    For the next 3 days, we want to illustrate some different aspects of why we believe it’s important to offer ways to enjoy being outdoors – including the personal and informal as well as more formal examples.

    Why go outdoors in Tooting? Part 1 
    Rachel from fanSHEN Theatre will be helping run the games this Sunday. fanSHEN are also developing a 6-month series of free Tooting Field Days, which kick off in April in partnership with TTT.

    “As a warm-up to the Tooting Field Days, we’ll be helping out at Wild Afternoon, playing some games invented by the awesome San Francisco New Games Foundation. 

    Why? In August last year, our fanSHEN team spent almost every Saturday walking around Tooting, looking for good routes for the audio walks we were making. We had some ideas about what the routes might be, landmarks they might take in, how long they might take – but mostly we walked around to see where might be fun or interesting. 

    Flourishing in February
     When we got tired, we stopped at one of Tooting’s brilliant restaurants or cafes and refueled on egg kothu or samosas or 
    coffee while we pored over a map to see where we hadn’t tried yet. 
    We stumbled on places and met people 
    we wouldn’t normally. 
    Maybe because it was August and 
    everyone else was away, it felt a bit like a holiday, exploring a place without the pressure of needing to be in a 
    certain place at a particular time.

    These days weren’t particularly sunny – if you remember, a lovely sunny June gave way to a pretty mediocre July and August last year. They weren’t days when I would have sat outside; I’d have looked out of my window and seen it being overcast and blowy and decided not to make a big effort to leave the flat. But doing this project meant that I spent over 4 hours a day walking around outside. And it was brilliant.

    I think I probably spend most of my life in front of a screen. I don’t think as a kid I ever thought my life as a grown up would be like this. I don’t even think there was a point as a young adult I decided that I was happy to be this screen person because it was worth it for career success or something like that. Somehow I slid into this screen-based existence. Of course, on my desktop I have a picture taken on a real holiday, of a beautiful sunset.
    Flowering in February (hazel)

    So at some point while we were making these walks, I made a promise to myself to spend more time outside. 
    It’s a promise I’ve broken over the last six months. Yeah, it’s been winter, and yeah, I’ve been busy, but the bottom line is that I’ve opted for screen over surroundings, even though I know how much happier I’d be being outside. 
    (And I’m not the only one – there’s a body of evidence to suggest that well-being is improved by getting outside).

    But things are going to change. So we’re making the Tooting Field Day project about being outside, allowing yourself to be surprised and having fun with a bunch of people you might not meet in your daily life. There’ll be walks and games and craftiness and samosas and coffee and maybe even egg kothu! More details to come.
    Hopefully you can make it to the Wild Afternoon on Sunday 22nd and then monthly from April – bet you a samosa it’ll make you happier than spending the afternoon in front of the computer”

    Rachel Briscoe fanshen.org.uk  @fanshentheatre 
    Thank you, Rachel! 
    And all welcome on Sunday…and from April-Sept for the Field Days.
    – Charles

  • Make time for making at this Wednesdays Meet & Make

    The first Meet & Make of 2015 is happening this Wednesday 11th from 6.30pm at Sprout.

    It’s a sewing session so bring along a project from home you already have on the go (or ready to start) and SMArT will provide a sewing machine and all the sewing paraphernalia you are likely to need to do the next few steps or indeed to finish it.

    SMArT will also be providing a featured activity of self made scrunchies equipment materials and guidance to create your own hair bobbles from fabric odds and ends.

    Please bring if you can a (voluntary) small cash donation to go towards Sprout running costs and snacks to share if you feel like it. Hot tea will be provided by SMArT.

  • A Wild Afternoon in Tooting 22nd Feb

    The film is a passionate and witty exploration about how to enable young people (and the adults who may not be sure how to help make this happen) to get outdoors – and swap screen time for wild time. More information on the Project Wild Thing website.

    Booking: Come for the whole afternoon, or for either of the two parts. So we can make plans for numbers of participants, please book in for free here. Or of course drop in on the day.

    More details on Project Dirt.

  • Insect Hotel – Project Complete, first invertebrates move in!

    A lot has happened since the insects last blogged: 3 sessions with Gatton Primary, Christmas, New Year and most all of January! High time we caught you up.

    The last 3 sessions with the school where filled with habitat creation. Each week we looked back at the 15 minute “mini-hotels” during the first 4 sessions and were delighted to find lots of tenants. Wood lice, worms, centipedes and millipedes had moved in to the nooks and crannies.

    On Tuesday January 20th, we convened a celebration with 7 student reps and 2 VIPs… our local Councillor from Wandsworth Council, Candida Jones and Chris Young from RHS Campaign for School Gardening. TTT contributors to the project also came along, as did teachers from Gatton School. We’re delighted you could all come, thank you for sparing the time.

    The Insect Hotel is named! The 7 Student Reps with Rifat Batool, Headteacher and Chris Young, RHS  Regional Campaign for School Gardening Advisor, London.

    Read on to read the words of the Student Reps, what was their experience?

    After a brief welcome, it was over to the students to tell us about the experience form their point of view before the official naming of… wait for it… “Bugs’R’Us” Insect Hotel! Here’s excerpts of what the 7 children said:

    “The project that we have been working on (The Insect Hotel) has helped us develop a sense of responsibility as well as a variety of hands on skills like sawing, drilling, construction and of course our weekly search for the “bugs” that have taken shelter in our mini hotels.”

    Of the mini-hotels, the children said…
    “…it was always interesting to come back the next week to see what creatures were visiting and which “rooms” they preferred. Darker, gloomier and smaller seems to be the attraction.”

    “We were amazed to discover the hidden crevices that bugs seem to enjoy visiting when we created our mini hotels, to get an idea of the habitats of different creatures in the garden.”

    And of being in a natural environment – not an everyday experience in our urban setting…

    “We were quite amazed with ourselves to know that we could actually hold a worm in our hands and not run for cover.”

    And of the experience as a whole…
    “We have learned the importance of being eco-friendly, recycling our waste and the amazing role that “bugs” play in our environment.”

    “Overall, we had a wonderful and memorable experience and hope we come back here to contribute towards another project very soon.”

    Over the next weeks and months we’ll gently add habitat to the Hotel and label up the different niches we have created. We’re also starting a conversation about how to share learning about the project. Should you want to hear our experience in more detail – do email transitiontowntooting@gmail.com.

    A big thank you to Naseem Aboobaker and all at Mushkil Aasaan, the local charity who own the site and continue to encourage us to garden and teach at Tooting Community Garden.

    And thank you to Ms Syeda and Ms Shazia at Gatton School for leading the Eco-Schools project and checking permissions for photos for this blog week in week out!

    And the teachers and teaching assistants from Gatton School, Mr.Amin, Ms.Fathima, Ms.Neelam for your engagement at the garden and parallel work in the classroom – the students were really well prepared!

    And finally, a big THANK YOU to all the volunteers from Transition Town Tooting who contributed their time, energy and application to the project.

  • Birds, stories, a volcano, willows: a winter day in the Community Garden, Sunday 25th January

    All welcome to join us for a winter day this weekend in the 
    Tooting Community Garden at 5 North Drive, SW16 1RN

    Brave the cold outside, 
    and swap screen time for wild time
    1030-1130

    Shhhhh…take part in the RSPB Garden Birdwatch

    1145

    Bird-themed storytelling with Emily Duizend

    1200

    Tea making with the volcano kettle

    1230-1330

    Get active adding willow to our living willow yurt  

    >Come for any part or all of the day
    >For all ages 5-105
    >All materials provided
    >The activity area is wheelchair accessible
    >Nearest toilet to the garden is at Tooting Athletics Track
    >To see the poster: click here 

    >Updates: Tooting Community Garden or Transition Town Tooting on Facebook
    >Many thanks to Emily Duizend: www.storyisland.net


    We started the willow yurt 3 years ago
    Any queries, please comment on Facebook or email us here

  • Community Celebration at Parliament

    It was great to attend Sadiq Khan’s community group celebration at the Speaker’s house at the Houses of Parliament on Wednesday. These gatherings of the many different Tooting and Wandsworth community groups are a great opportunity to make contact and network. Just for example, connections ranged from meeting Sudha, Ramesh and Kanta of the Hindu Society in Garratt Lane who run a programme for senior citizens on Thursday lunchtimes to meeting Tooting tweeters Alice and Andrew, alias Tooting About; the evening was full of interesting chats.

    We also got to wander around the amazing rooms steeped in hundreds of years of history, the walls adorned with pictures of the Speakers down the centuriues.  We heard a polished and witty presentation from current Speaker Jon Bercow and applauded some Sadiq-selected Community Heroes. Here’s hoping that there is more collaboration and cross-fertilisation of all our area’s local groups in 2015.

  • Transport in Tooting

    A few transport issues have caught my eye this weekend. Firstly I am well in support of Wandsworth Council’s opposition to the expansion of Heathrow. Who wants more aircraft noise blighting our quiet enjoyment of SW17 and around. Not me. See the Council’s reasoning and ways to have a say in the consultation here.

    Crossrail2 Safeguarding Area

    Another issue for consultation is the proposed route and access shafts for Crossrail2. The plans will undoubtedly be of benefit to commuters in the Tooting Broadway area, but a big concern for me is the proposal to site permanent access shafts on both Trinity Fields and Wandsworth Common. This is currently under consultation and I think it is important to oppose any further infringement into community green spaces. Dan Watkins has a good analysis of the impacts for Tooting and around on his site here.  You have until Weds 28th January to voice your opinion to crossrail2@tfl.gov.uk.

    Meanwhile Jon Irwin’s tireless campaigning for a more people and cycle friendly urban space in our area continues. His latest campiagn is to make Tooting Bec Road safer. Will Balham Boulevard become a reality this year? I hope so. Check out details on these and the latest on local cycling and street design issues here. 

    Finally Wandsworth Council’s snail’s progress towards 20mph on residential roads sees some action now in Bedford and Furzedown but what about the rest of us? Let’s hope there is more progress in 2015. Wandsworth Living Streets and the Wandsworth group of 20s Plenty For Us continue to campaign for better safer streets for all.  dt

  • ‘I never knew you could do so much with paper’

    The title for this first TTT blog post of New Year 2015 is a parent’s comment at our ‘Reduce, Re-use, RESPARKLE!’ crafts making session run with the Tooting Library on the Saturday before Christmas. 

    ‘I never knew you could do so much with paper’ is a great prompt for us all about seeing things differently, about challenge, about taking action, about sustainability, about exploring new skills together across ages and cultures, about appreciating the local settings we have in Tooting (including great community places like the Library), about coming together to have some surprises and fun.

    Those are all ‘resolutions’ that TTT will  aspire to in 2015. 

    What did we do in the ‘RESPARKLE!’ session?

    We used recycled materials and simple methods to enthuse children and adults with making beautiful seasonal decorations, presents or bags from ‘waste’ – old newspapers from the Library, single-side printed A4 docs, juice cartons, and more.

    It was a very full two hours – from a standing start at 2:00 pm, we were almost swamped by lots of nimble fingers, questions, concentration and focus, and smiles…and a big range of ages, nationalities and cultures. 

    We had over 30 children active at once; we had adults making things too, and families setting up tables and doing their own thing (all these activities can be done at home with household materials).  
    We expected a fun session, and this was nearly off the scale….!


     





    Thanks so much to the GLL staff at Tooting Library, and to our six skilful TTT volunteers.
    Cheers to the Children’s Librarian for these nice comments: ‘the event went brilliantly, was well organised, well attended and great fun. I was really pleased to have you along for the day’. 
     
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