2007 - 2008 Annual reports
This is Leaders in Community First Year, and it has been a very good start, thanks to the efforts put in by the young people, and of course the overwhelming support that we got from Poplar Harca and Leabank Project. A huge thanks go to our partner groups and agencies as well without whose material and financial support, we would not have been able to fulfil what we have set out to achieve during this year.
It has been a very busy year, as we have been working towards establishing our constitution, getting our policies and procedures all written up and agreed.
We have finally out our Management Committee and have now elected our Chair Hanna Dualeh. Enclosed in This annual report is a look at the year and LiC’s development in detail, LiC event report, The Community Movie Nights Project Report.
February 2007
A group of young men aged 18-19 were taken away on a residential to explore their experience of living in poplar and identified a number of issues with the community they like to address and change:
After a very successful residential, the existing group drew up a plan of action to achieve their objectives for the group.
However it became extremely difficult to recruit young women to the project, however very necessary.
Much of our time had been taken up trying to recruit a diverse group from the community; this was done with the assistance of refugee youth, we held regular meetings to share and exchange ideas. At this we had the existing group of young Bengali men from the area and 2 Somali young woman. Again their was no cohesion in the group as the members did not see themselves as one group rather as 2 different.
April 2007
We continued to have our regular meetings, at this point the group had become frustrated that no much has happened in terms of moving forward. We were unsuccessful in generating interest amongst the young women and the young men were losing interest as none of the action point was being done.
By this stage we were meeting refugee Youth less
We had decided that it was almost an impossible task to try and recruit and meet action points so I decided to ask some of my peers from the local area to assist in drumming support for the group.
By the end of the 6 month period we now had a mix group of 9 young men and 3 Bengali young women
This group then set up their rules of engagement, objectives, and we decided to work towards an event as a way to recruit more support.
May 2007
We took 3 of our actions points from the residential and decided to put it to action
- make better lighting at the Abbott road football pitch
- community movie nights
- an event/for summer
Our main challenge was still recruiting more young women, but now we had to face financial difficulties.
We learnt to start networking with as many people as possible; the members attended some Aberfeldy estate board to do a presentation, and were asked by Poplar Harca to support them in the development of their Policy advisory groups which seek local residents to help improve services.
This appeared to be the right way forward as Poplar Harca are our landlords, any changes we wanted to make would be best to do some work with them.
At the same time, we had learnt that John Baker a resident and director of LeaBank project were interested in helping supporting the group in it development stages.
This was our biggest breakthrough in terms of development and a huge part of our learning.
We learnt what was reacquired to set up a group on our own, as it was important that we were not just another youth group that disintegrated into nothing after a while.
We knew we had to look at a name from the group but also look at establishing a set of rules and objectives
June 2007
Tower hamlets community Organisations forum- helped us put together a terms of reference and gave us some guidance in terms of fundraising.
Leabank working with us to support our public art work project and we were planning towards our big event in Aug 2007
PoplarHarca’s Jessica Wanamaker assisted is in making links with key funders as wells getting us contacts with CEMVO - Council for ethnic minority voluntary groups.
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July 2007
By now the group had evolved after numerous meetings for development we now had 20 members, a terms of reference, and our public art work had started. Each meeting was minuted and minutes were distributed to all members to ensure constant flow of information. We now had a name for the group Leaders in Community (LiC), the group worked on logo for the name.
We were also working on possible funding opportunities
The group did become frustrated with meeting John Baker; however it was key that we kept that relationship going:
- 1. he was our main support, he also offered us a space to be able to come together
- 2. It was important for the members to be able to work with much older residents.
We had to start working on our publicity for the LiC event in August and getting the entertainment ready.
August 2007
Saw the launch for the LiC event at the Aberfeldy- St Nicholas hall, a very successful turn out with 60 young people turning up; we had some live performances from local young people, which was the main attraction. But the day was more about getting more young people to address issues of concern to them and how they would want to make change.
September 2007
We submitted a funding bid to the Film Audience Fund part of the Big Lottery for 3k.
Our meetings with CEMVO had started and we were working to develop a constitution and open a bank account. The group also were working to submit an application to Cemvo for 5k
Some members had been doing partnership work with Tower hamlets, and discussions were taking place about working on an inert faith DVD with poplar Harca- Rufus Clarke.
Oct 2007
We found out that the bid to the Film Audience Fund was successful, planning had started
Some members more on developing the art work, as our plan is that in the New Year we will have identified a mural to project our art displays onto.
Sarah-Jane Niin Adjei and Kawser Meah, Momtaz Begum, Aleef Ahmed, and Ruhul Abdin, Members of the group had the opportunity to support Poplar Harca for the Gold Award presentation in Manchester.
We had a very successful workshop, very well received
November 2007
Most of the young women from the group supported Poplar Harca’s staff award ceremony
Aleef Ahmed and Sarah-Jane, Momtaz did a presentation at the DCLG conference in Westminster with Sarah-Castro, again very well received and made many links with different organisation. Our presentation was topped by Hazel Blears making reference to our speeches.
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Our success in a span of one year has brought us to the attention of agencies working with young people. Poplar HARCA is one of them who also facilitated us making a presentation about our model of working with young people, at a forum organized by the Department of Communities and Local Government. Secretary of State Hazel Blears acknowledged and praised our model in her speech on the same day. We have also presented to an ASB Practitioners’ Forum organized by Scotland Yard as well as to a Practitioners’ Forum organized by Hackney Homes.
This has encouraged us to explore the possibility of setting ourselves up as a social enterprise, becoming a centre of excellence for youth leadership. As an enterprise, we will seek to disseminate our model to other organizations involved in youth work in 2008, and are looking at successful ways of working with young people. We will also work towards being able to assist/support and train young people to set up their own social enterprise to ensure that young people maximize the opportunities the regeneration of the area will bring.
We also completed our final presentation with Poplar Harca’s Gold Award, another very interactive workshop.
It has been a very long process but it is evident that the development of the group is slowly taking place as more organisations are learning about the group and its objectives the continues to help shape services to be inclusive of their young residents, making sure that they are included in any decision making processes that can effect their lives as well as their family and friends.
It now became apparent that the group was able to influence more organisations to help improve their services.
As a result we have been invited to an ASB practitioners Forum in December 2007 and again in Scotland Yard in March 2008.
Signed:
Ruhul Abdin
Vice Chairperson
31st March 2008
