What a crazy life we lead.
There’s a few things ticking away in the background that need to be mentioned prior to what I really want to say here.
Cycle Campaigning
I wrote a while back about my desire to get involved in some cycle promotion and campaigning. I think there’s strength in numbers, so I’ve contacted our local “cycle champion” and hope to be meeting up soon to work out how I might be able to help her out.
Travel Plans
I work for a small company on a business park and the management company that run the park recently put out an invitation for representatives from each company to attend a meeting about a travel plan that thay are trying to put together. The basis is a travel plan is that you survey how people travel, put together a strategy for changing that, implement the strategy, re-survey to see if you’ve had an effect and then repeat.
So I volunteered and went along. The travel plan is a great idea and I met some interesting people. I hope it will be the start of the companies on the business park coming together a bit more and I have other ideas about how this might be useful.
Wichelstowe
Worthy of a post of its own, the Wichelstowe Community Project is starting to take off, and some form of Christian worship will follow. The minister and her family have moved in, and we shall be helping them to get started.
The Wichelstowe development was/is controvertial as it’s on greenbelt land (and for a whole load of other reasons), but our view is that it’s happening, and will continue to happen, so we’re going to make the best of it by building a decent community.
We also want to respect that the development is on greenbelt and engage with that, educating the community on what wildlife is there, how it’s being protected, how people can connect with the nature and wildlife of the area.
This has, kind of accidentally, become part of a slightly different piece of work that lovely wife and I are doing, and so we’ve met with a man from the council who runs the “Great Western Community Forest”, and we’ve also been in contact with the Wiltshire Wildlife Trust.
The bigger project has also bought me into contact with someone who’s responsible for developing transport strategy.
The Tangled Web
And so we find ourselves entering this crazy network of people. Through various diffeent entry points we’ve found that:
- The cycle champ knows the transport strategy people we had contact with through Wichelstowe.
- The transport strategy woman is helping out with the Travel Plan.
- The Great Western Community Forest man knows the cycle champion.
- The Wiltshire Wildlife Trust guy works closely with the Great Western Community Forest guy.
- Some of these people also know other people who’ve already been working with the Wichelstowe project.
It’s all a bit weird. It seems that a lot of our council services are run by a small bunch of very busy people. What’s a shame is that the council funding for sustainability projects is being cut, so most of these teams are also shrinking.
These people need all the help they can get, and they’re involved in all sorts of things that are of interest to lovely wife and I. The question is, will we have time to get involved in much of what they’re doing and help them out? We’d certainly like to!