A place to discuss, let off steam, learn, generate ideas, sound off, sound out and shout about your successes
This is the story of Better Birthdays (in the UK), it all started back in the lockdown days of the pandemic, remember them?
I had been working with Dr Hannah McDowell (co-founder of Canopy, a social imagination project) on various programmes. We decided that we needed to focus upon ageing across the life course. There is so much focus is on 50+ and little on changing attitudes to ageing from the get-go of birth.
So in 2020 rather than sitting on our hands we ran a variety of online sessions and thought what better way to highlight the issues and attitudes towards ageing than birthdays and birthday cards? We set ourselves the challenge of designing anti-ageist cards.
You can hear me tell the story in the podcast section of this website.
Read moreA member of the community put a notice on the two bus stops on the estate calling a meeting to protest about proposed changes in the bus service – this was in 2021
A group was formed who later became the Ashton Vale Suffragettes
They organised meetings with the Council, the local Mayor and the Regional Mayor as well as the bus company to try to find out what the reasons were behind proposed changes and what could be done to improve matters.
The group didn’t get the kind of hearing they expected and they joined with other groups involved in local bus campaigns. They joined in with national Reclaim our Buses protests.
They had a sit in.
They designed a poster, a leaflet, sent letters and carried out the walk of shame bringing everyone along to demonstrate how difficult it was for residents to walk the distance to the nearest bus route. A film was made of the walk and the women engaged with local reporters and BBC and independent tv crews to get their points across.
Most importantly, they supported each other.
I have been concerned about Climate Change for a long time, and wondered how to talk about it to my grandchildren without worrying them. I decided that I wouldn’t talk to them until they asked me questions about it as I wanted them to enjoy life and appreciate the world while they were young. However, I also wanted to try and ‘do my bit’ to make our government and world leaders wake up and do something about a rapidly increasing crisis. I found other grandparents who felt the same, and, being aware of Greta Thunberg and the student protestors, we decided we had to do something too. It was our generation who had caused the problem, and the young people were having to deal with it.
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