Welcome! This blog has been created to tell our story. The story of our journey to connect our neighbourhood. Our neighbourhood is Firs & Bromford, an outer estate in Hodge Hill in the East of Birmingham.
We are a group of people with a passion to build community by getting onto our streets, and actively finding creative ways to connect together people, places, groups, ideas, energy, hopes and dreams.
For us Street Connecting involves…
- Finding the natural connectors in our neighbourhood. Connectors are people who have a passion for the wellbeing of the community, are well connected and trusted by neighbours, are able to make connections and have a motivation to community build, love to listen, make people feel welcome, spot the gifts and skills in others and believe in all people.
- Nurturing an ever increasing group connectors, and working as a team to pay attention to our neighbourhood and find creative ways to connect with our neighbours. This is what we call ‘hunting the edges’. For us usually begins on the doorstep of our neighbours with regular door knocking.
- Having a different kind of conversation with our neighbours: Good Life Conversations. These are to unearth their gifts, talents and skills, and identifying ways these could be offered and shared with others. Listening to concerns and fears but following that up with ‘what do you think we could do together about it?’
- Developing ways to bring people together at a street level focusing on patches of 100-200 households. These take the form of street parties led by local hosts.
- Being present in places that people gather. These are the natural bumping places (e.g. the school gate), encouraging social interaction and places of welcome.
- Seek to have deeper conversations. Those that lead to reflection, involvement, inclusion and action.
- Giving time to support people who want to share their gift or skills, and help nurture an ecology of welcoming people, groups and spaces in our community.
- Paying attention to ways that the stories of our neighbourhood can be shared to enable us to create a shared vision of the neighbourhood we wish to live in. Plus finding ways to celebrate!
This is our collection of stories, reflections, laments, and snapshots of our journey. We hope you enjoy and please share with others.
Street Connecting in Firs & Bromford is delivered by Open Door Community Foundation Visit ODCF Website and is part of the ‘Together We Can!’ Project working in partnership with Worth Unlimited Visit Worth Unlimited Website and Firs & Bromford Neighbours Together Visit FBNT Website.
Street Connecting is co-funded by Big Lottery Reaching Community and Big Local.
Welcome to our street connecting story 