Celebrating and sharing learning from our experience of 'Rooting in Tooting'

This autumn TTT is delighted to be able to contribute to events to share our learning from Rooting in Tooting (our joint project with the refugee and asylum seeker community served by CARAS)
It's brilliant to be meeting new people and groups, and sharing in different ways: thank you for the invitations!
We certainly don't 'have all the answers' but we would like to join others in asking questions and sharing practice.

There are 4 very diverse autumn 2016 events where we're celebrating or telling the Rooting in Tooting story:

1 The Royal Horticultural Society OneRHS managers conference

                  Credit: RHS / Julian Weigall

CARAS & TTT were honoured to be the only outside speakers at this event for 175 RHS managers. We had fascinating discussions about how the RHS can most effectively engage with community projects.



2 Team London Volunteer Awards 2016
TTT is thrilled to be on the awards shortlist in the Greening & Cleaning category of the Awards. We'll be joining other voluntary groups for the ceremony. Here's the Mayor's tweet on Monday morning: @MayorofLondon @SadiqKhan will celebrate the capital's volunteering heroes at tonight's #TeamLdnAwards at City Hall.

 

3 Cause2Create: "where we find specific, targeted solutions to challenges posed by the refugee crisis"
We're invited to Cause2Create's 'hack' weekend. "We know we’re not going to solve the refugee crisis in one weekend, but we can explore some of the specific challenges and develop scalable and actionable solutions."

4 International Volunteering Conference at City Hall, celebrating London as European Volunteering Capital 2016
CARAS & TTT are co-facilitating one of the conference workshops in December. Joining in with the Greek volunteering NGO Ethelon, the aim is to explore training and community engagement aspects of working well with refugees. What benefits do both refugees and communities experience when working together?

Restart and Sew-vember - an afternoon of fixing and mending!

Come and join us on Saturday November the 12th for an afternoon of fixing and mending!

Whether it’s electrical or electronic items that you don’t want to throw away

or a sewing machine that is broken or you’re not sure how to use.

Have a favourite piece of clothing that needs mending or altering and you’d like to learn how?  Or simply good at fixing and mending stuff.

Or maybe you fancy a cup of tea, a piece of cake and a chance to find out more about Transition Tooting and what we get up to?

Come along on

Saturday 12th November, 2 - 5pm

Mushkil Aasaan, 220 - 222 Upper Tooting Road, SW17 7EW (next to Nando’s)    

(Restart Parties are a community self-repair space where you take responsibility for your own gadgets and data, so please don’t forget to take any back-ups beforehand, if relevant – and if possible arrive during the first two hours to allow time for fixing!   More info about Restart including details of regular skillshares at www,therestartproject.org)

                                                          

'Gardens of Refuge': our new partnership project for 2017 with CARAS & The Grange. Vote for funding online through the Aviva Community Fund!

“To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.” (Audrey Hepburn)

We are thrilled that Gardens of Refuge, our new partnership project plan has reached the final public voting stage of the Aviva Community Fund! The project is centred on the refugee and asylum-seeker community who are supported by the Tooting charity CARAS.

Read the description of the project online here.

For the future: bulbs for 2017

Gardens of Refuge is listed under 'CARAS' on the Aviva Community Fund website.
You'll see that the project is all about growing the therapeutic benefits of gardening plus greening the community we share in Tooting.  
And it's about building ways to enable refugees to share their knowledge and skills locally to imagine and create a more beautiful neighbourhood as a legacy for all.

Legacy: flourishing from 2015's cuttings

There are three partners in Gardens of Refuge:

CARAS - with whom we have worked in depth for 18 months  on Rooting in Tooting.

The Grange - a residential respite and permaculture centre in Norfolk who work with CARAS. Please see The Grange.

& Transition Town Tooting

As of today, the website is live for the public to vote for the projects they would like Aviva to support. 
Voting is open until 18th November: but please don't delay!
Please vote and encourage Aviva to support Gardens of Refuge!  

You have to register individually before you can vote: to register, please click here for the Aviva webpage
Then search for CARAS or Gardens of Refuge to vote!

Thank you so much for your support, 

and please contact us by email if you have any queries.

Tooting Green Drinks! Roll up! Roll Up!

Lovely Green Drinks in Tooting last night at The Selkirk, thanks for hosting! 

We got to know the London National Park City initiative better and asked how we would raise London's green cover from 48% (current) to 51%???? Our answer is..., Parklets! Green up the base of trees, hand over 1 car parking space to green infrastructure! Guerrilla Garden where you can! Turn the small spaces green, lobby the council to use http://www.frontyardcompany.co.uk/products/plantlock.html...

So... where would YOU create a Parklet?

We launched Green Book Club! Whoop! Want to join in? We have 2 articles to read which will be part of the discussion at the next Tooting Green Drinks: 

• Is talk about it the most important thing we can do about climate change?

https://thinkprogress.org/end-climate-silence-cbe439a31a8e…

And...

• After plastic bag tax what should we tax next?

https://www.theguardian.com/…/six-billion-plastic-bags-cant…

So... How could Green Book Club work best for you?? Online discussion? Articles? Youtube vids and TEDtalks? Books?

AND... we talked about a programme of short, informal talks in the new year - watch this space for announcements on that.

So... who would you like to come to Tooting Green Drinks to give short talks? What themes could we cover?

AND!!!! We talked up Dipa's secret, tasty idea... but you really will have to wait to hear more about that one... yum!

Green Drinks is an International idea to create informal spaces for discussion and getting to know like minded people in your area. www.greendrinks.org

We host a Tooting Green Drinks on the third Wednesday of every month at The Selkirk Pub, 60 Selkirk Street, SW17 0ES between 7.30pm and 9.30pm