At the AGM, Chris Bunting threw out ideas about devolving responsibility of Ealing's open spaces to the community.
The Active Citizen Project aims to develop a place-based active citizen offer for the whole council. It intends to capitalise on the assets and capabilities of residents, communities and businesses in order to strengthen their capacity to help themselves. It aims to create added social, economic, and environmental value that supports the well-being and resilience of communities whilst reducing pressures on public services.
The intended outcome is a resetting of the relationship between council and residents, whereby most residents are self-reliant, demand on services is reduced and the council is able to make savings in order to target its limited resources on areas where it is needed most.
Currently Ealing Council manage the maintenance of all 147 parks in the borough, but would like to explore how management of these green spaces could be devolved to Friends of Groups, local resident groups and local businesses. We need to rapidly explore how to increase the number of friends of parks groups to reflect the volume of green space we have in the borough.
Secondly, we need to work with our existing community groups to encourage these groups to become more involved in maintaining the flower beds and cleanliness of their local parks. We wish to proactively work with our existing and newly formed friends of parks groups to encourage them to take on the maintenance and management of their park.
The committee of Friends of Haven Green would love to hear considered thought and comments from our community.
All comments will go through a ratification process for relevance and common decency before they are posted live to the website for others to see.
The committee will take all the comments into consideration in our discussions. Thank you for your involvement.