All posts in the topic Welcome and Introductions (Short link)
Summary
- There are 2 posts — by 1 authors — in this topic.
- Latest post made by Angela Piccini at Oct 26 10:03 UTC
Welcome! I'm Angela Piccini, forum manager and current Chair of Brislington
Community Partnership. I took over from the Partnership's founding Chair, David
Waters, in November 2007.
Brislington Community Partnership (BCP) was founded in 1999 and is made up of
residents, business representatives, interested individuals, members of
community groups and representatives from schools, churches and statutory
agencies. Our vision for Brislington is:
• To be prosperous, harmonious and safe;
• To support a vibrant and growing local economy that is balanced with the
protection of our local environment;
• That people in the area will have equal access to opportunities, including
employment, training and education;
• That people in the area have opportunities to participate in local decision
making;
• To be a sustainable community.
In its history, the Partnership has achieved notable successes in the East and
West Wards, including the establishment of working groups such as Respect
(youth issues) and Friends of Nightingale Valley to deal with specific issues
in our community. The Partnership also set up a stand-alone website
(www.brislington.org) and has drawn up a community directory of businesses and
groups that serve the area. For the past 2 years the Partnership has been
working with the City Council's Environment and Sustainability Unit to produce
a Community Action Plan, which is to be launched in July 2008. More recently,
the Partnership has become a formal Neighbourhood Partnership, working closely
with Community Development and PACT (Police and Communities Together). The
Partnership is also an active member of the Bristol Neighbourhood Planning
Network.
Although I am Chair of the Partnership, it is important that you see this
e-forum as a space in which to raise and discuss issues that may not have been
given attention by either the Partnership or any of the formal entities with
which it works. We can help to bring your questions, concerns and issues to the
table and address these through meaningful action.
I look forward to meeting all of you and hearing your views!
As the forum manager I'd like to remind all members of a couple of things.
First of all, please do use this topic thread to introduce yourself and your
interest in Brislington. This site is meant to network ideas and people so
let's see what kinds of local expertise we have on hand. Also, with reference
to Jamie's Pass-it-On, please encourage all your friends and family to sign up
to the forum. Finally, I wanted to clarify what this forum can achieve. It's
not a site maintained or even overseen by Bristol City Council. Some of our
councillors are members of the forum so may address your issues. However, it
would be good to minimise traffic on this site that simply points to problems
in Brislington without concrete, positive suggestions for how we might come
together as a community to solve them.
A good example is Jubilee Pool. That generated a lot of traffic on this site.
We organised a meeting to see about setting up a lobbying group to save the
pool. 3 people turned up, 2 of whom were Partnership members who were there
primarily to facilitate and gauge the level of actual, active interest. We
can't save the pool that way.
I really recommend looking at the Bedminster forum postings as a good model of
how we might use this as a tool to act positively in the community. Brislington
needs more people on the ground doing things. I'd like to see groups of you
springing up to take action. It doesn't have to come through, or even involve,
me! Think global, act local - as they used to say in my Canadian youth.
thanks for listening
Angela