November Meeting October 14, 2010

Transition Town Heaton Meeting – All Welcome!

Wednesday 3rd November @ first floor of Hyem Bar on Chillingham Road

We will be discussing the plan for joining in with the Shields Road festival and events for 2011.

Meetings are the first Wednesday of every month and from December onwards we will return to our regular location at Charles Street Community Centre

 

Transition Heaton is back online! September 10, 2010

After a bit of a lull, we are going to try and make sure the website is regularly updated with Transition Town goings on in Heaton.

We are currently a small group meeting mainly at Charles Street Community Centre just off Shields Road / Chillingham Road. We are looking to expand our activities and encourage more people interested in transition towns / climate change / community development to join us. New ideas are welcome!

For more info on Transition Towns and other local information there are links on the right. If you want to find out more just get in touch or drop by at a meeting.

Si

Jam and Chutney Making Workshop September 10, 2010

Saturday 25th September @ Charles Street Community Centre

Attendance is FREE and everyone is welcome

Children must be accompanied & supervised by an adult

If you have any spare jam jars please bring them along

Click here for a google map!

Allotments October 23, 2009

transition-initiative-newcastle@talktalk.net

Transition has started a small group interested in pursuing allotment expansion in Newcastle. Interested ?
E mail the address above. Cheers (23.10.09)

Heaton Transition Meeting September 4, 2009

To all those interested in Transition Initiative Heaton,

We invite you to join us on the evening of 17th September to explore how Heaton will make the transition from oil dependancy to local resilience. We will be showing a short film which will be followed by a brief history of Transition Heaton so far. Which will leave plenty of time for discussion and everyone to share ideas and ways forward.

Heaton Transition Meeting
Thursday 17th September
7pm, FREE entry
The Chillingham, Chillingham Road, Heaton
Drinks available from the bar

See you soon,

Transition Initiative Heaton

Minutes- 08/06/09 June 9, 2009

Minutes- 08/06/09

Present: Dave, Jeanie (briefly), Chris, Joyce, Rachel E

- Ouseburn festival

Chris has created some questionairres- one for children/ one for adults which will be posted on the Heaton part of
http://newcastletransition.wordpress.com/. So that people can see it and suggest alterations etc.

Everybody to look out for Transition town articles in newspapers and magazines to display at the stall

Rachel D to ask the strategy group about borrowing some resources for the Ouseburn stall.

Dave has a slightly altered version of the leaflet Steve E produced for Tin which Rachel E is going to do some artwork for.

Plant a seed- what could we plant that would excite children in July- everybody to have a think.

- Next event?

Decided it was important to organise another event not too long after the stall at the Ouseburn

Show a film in Heaton- power of community (Ask Chris of strategy group about borrowing DVD).
Rachel D agreed to research local community spaces we could show the film.

Talked about creating posters with the images available to download off the power of community website

-Funding

Decided we may want to look into fundraising. Rachel D to talk to some members of the strategy group who are keen to help out with funding applications. Joyce is going to look into getting money through ward committees.

Also the question arose as to whether we would apply for funding as our Heaton group or through the strategy group.

-Iris Brickfield

Community is meeting together at Iris Brickfield tomorrow 09/06/09 to look at the possibilities of the community garden.

-Being crafty

We talked about local craft groups and vaguely suggested Rachel D’s knitting club go public.

-Plastic bag free Heaton

Rachel D informed the group about a new group which may be ridding Heaton of plastic bags

oh, and then we were to make origami newspaper seed pots by Rach D

Next meeting: Monday 29th June 1900 Tenth Ave Community rooms

Love Rachel

Minutes 18 May 2009 Meeting Community Rooms Heaton May 19, 2009

Minutes 18 May 2009 Meeting Community Rooms Heaton

Present: Chris, Rachel E, Jeanie, Dave
Apologies: Josh & Rachel D

Ouseburn Festival (19th July).

It was agreed to do a stall at the festival however one of the organisers of the festival suggested we would have problems with Health & Safety, CRB checks and insurance if we wanted to do any activities not based at the stall itself, making fun activities slightly more challenging. Thought themes we could look at for stall would be local food /  allotments, transport, skill sharing and possibly car sharing.

Possible activities – something for children e.g. Making pots for growing things from newspaper

Fun quiz – with prize(s)?

Questionnaire asking people what issues they might be interested in pursuing through Transition Towns

+ leaflets and other info

Banner / posters for table to attract interest

We will contact food group to to see if they would like to be involved.

Any ideas for plants we could use on the stall mid-July?

Chris agreed to make a start on quiz for the stall.

Rachel to consider artwork for leaflets / ideas for a (simple) banner for the stall.

Dave to set up pages for organising on website.

Check out availability of people / other volunteers to help run stall – Sunday 19th July

Aim towards a public meeting probably in September using contacts from the stall and ideas generated from questionnaires.

Any other ideas for Ouseburn Festival welcome!

Greening Heaton

Nothing much seems to be happening at present. Jeanie to chase up.

Iris Brickfield

Fruit bush planting on 9 May went very well – approx 100 fruit bushes planted maybe about 20 people attending.

Next meeting for evolving Friends group provisionally set for 28th May or 4th June.

Website

Dave will set up extra pages for discussion of the above events.

Community Room

Hire is £1 each with a minimum of £6

Next Meeting

8th June Community Rooms 59 10th Ave 19:00

Minutes of Transiton Heaton Meeting at 1900 on 27 April 2009 at The Community Rooms, 59 10th Avenue April 29, 2009

 

Present were Jeannie, Dave, Rachel E, Rachel D, Chris and Josh, with apologies from Jayne M, Jill W and Dan

 

Rachel D has been in touch with the organisers of the Ouseburn Festival, happening 18/19th of July 2009 and they are happy for us to have a presence/stall at the event.  They also run other events in the area which we could make use of.  We need to choose how we will present ourselves and think up some fun activities that we could do at this family festival to get people interested in transitioning.  We will also use this as an opportunity to consult with local folk and get their ideas.

 

We have yet to hear when the council-run Greening Heaton event will be on this year, in the past it has been around the end of May/beginning of June.  This will be another opportunity for us.

 

There is a meeting/hedge planting session at Iris Brickfield on 9 May 2009 at 1030 which hopes to generate some more community interest/support for the project going on over there.  At the moment this seems to be mostly council-led so it would be nice if some local enthusiasm were to be unleashed.

 

Josh fed back from the strategy group’s meeting with South Heaton Councillor Henri Murison; he seems very keen and eager to pursue environmental-type projects in Heaton, and would be open to approaches from local groups i.e. us with suggestions, advice or whatever.

 

The council has launched a scheme called Get Smarter which includes a car-sharing website of some kind, which we will be investigating further.

 

Jill W let us know via email that she has been looking into local loyalty card schemes and has had some interest from Newcastle Chamber of commerce for the idea.

 

The council has passed a motion supporting the idea of more allotments for Newcastle but there needs to be pressure applied locally if this is to be followed up with action.  We wondered if the waste ground along the railway tracks in the East of Heaton might be suitable sites.  Also whether allotments could be won from the development in the Ouseburn area in any way.

 

Another idea raised this meeting was to encourage free/wild food foraging in the Heaton area in some way, with foraging tours or perhaps rose petal sandwiches.   Rachel E will try and use her talents to make a flyer of some kind on this topic.  This raised the question of whether and how much the Council spray in public areas, which Dave will try and investigate for us.

 

The next meeting will be on Monday 18 May 2009 at 1900 at The Community Rooms, 59 10th Avenue.  We will be focussing on the upcoming events (Greening Heaton and the Ouseburn Festival) and designing our presence there, so come along with ideas and suggestions on this if you please!

 

We were planning on having different slot for the meeting but it seems that Monday evening is the least objectionable time of the week for rather a lot of people so we are sticking with this for now… sorry if I got your hopes up those of you who can’t make Mondays.

 

Hope to see you at the next meeting,

 

lots of love,

 

Josh

 

Local Shopping April 22, 2009

The Heaton group has discussed shopping locally and I have been looking into loyalty cards.

Bedale in North Yorkshire has recently had publicity about its Loyalty card scheme which local independent businesses and services buy into and then offer discounts and offers to customers. The card costs £2.50  for customers (a one-off cost, free replacements) and offers can be viewed over the Internet and emailed to scheme members..

www.bedale.org  is the Community website for Bedale and worth a look.

www.shoplocalny.co.uk is the website for the loyalty card schemes and local shopping campaign for North Yorkshire. It also has an Eat Local link.

The scheme promotes the local economy, sustainable living, health benefits and the reduction of carbon footprints.

A Google search reveals various local shopping initiatives eg in Devon but I can’t find anything in Newcastle or thereabouts. Since it would seem that a Tesco is replacing Somerfield’s on Chillingham Road, this might be something local independent shops and people would find useful.

With this in mind I have sent a query to Newcastle Chamber of Commerce.

More news soon hopefully.

Jill W

Report of meeting 6th Apr 2009 April 8, 2009

We met in the Community Rooms at 59 10th Avenue on 06/04/2009.

 

As there were two new faces at this meeting we had a brief recap of what a Transition group is meant to be and what we have got up to so far, i.e. visioning and creating a model future Heaton.

 

Rachel D gave us feedback from the Strategy Group:

We have been approached by South Heaton councillor Henri Murison who is offering his support to the movement in Newcastle.  We are somewhat wary of getting involved in party politics but certainly appreciate his enthusiasm.  We are proposing that Transition folk city-wide could speak to their local councillors across all parties to raise our profile in the City Council, so that we can approach the Council as a whole with a base of support in place.

There is an inkling of a Transition Fenham group in the works…

Transition Initiative Newcastle have been invited to give a talk/workshop/other to the WEA conference on 06/06/09.

 

The group discussed publicising ourselves more widely and encouraging more participation; there was a consensus that it would be best to do some more research and develop something a bit more solid before taking it to a much wider audience.

 

Jeanie reported back from last week’s Iris Brickfield meeting.  There were about a dozen local residents there, and a further meeting has been arranged for next week to arrange an event (e.g. hedgerow planting) to engage more people.

 

Several ideas were put forward as to what the group could do to encourage resilience in Heaton.  Some thoughts raised were:

• Looking at transport in Heaton – car sharing schemes, walking buses for schools.
• Encouraging aspiring food-growers – containers in back yards could be a good plan in terraces
• Giving talks or finding someone who could give talks on growing, medicinal herbs, unusual edibles and what people ate in the olden days.

We will try to have a presence at the “Greening Heaton” event which is to be held later this year.  Suggestions included an information stall; screenings of “The Power of Community” film; producing leaflets with easy to copy hints and tips for improved sustainability, e.g. backyard growing etc; finding a knowledgable gardener or two to provide help to people keen to start growing.

 

The next meeting will be held at 1900 on Monday 27/04/2009, at the Community Rooms, 59 10th Avenue, Heaton.

 

I understand that there are potential Heatonish Transitioners who can’t make Monday nights, so the meeting after this one will be on a different day, either another weekday evening or a weekend afternoon perhaps.  Let me know your preferences so that you can be there!

 

Thanks,

 

Happy wishes to all,

 

Josh