First Try-Out of Six Feet of Your Street

Our Community

And what a glorious thing it turned out to be! My own day started with a telephone chat with James from Radio Humberside that got hijacked by a barky dog and our staunch friend from Seafood Village – have a listen here…

But the community action itself you can get a good sense of from Connor’s article here: https://www.grimsbytelegraph.co.uk/news/grimsby-news/how-east-marsh-united-helping-3171257

And from Lee’s wonderful photos below (we have such talented East Marshians!).

We all gathered at the Methodist Chapel car park and there was that feeling when you throw a party – will anybody come? They did, and we were such a happy bunch, fleshed out by our friends at YMCA (thank you!) and NELC (thank you, too!) and some East Marshian kids who had heard about all of this and came along to join in (that’s their work on the boarded up house in Rutland Street, the lovely cat and dog picture). It was a very hot day, so we drank plenty of liquids and treated ourselves with cakes – and it was Vivienne’s birthday, so what a memorable way to celebrate a phenomenal human! On top of everything we had our Granarchists leading us all in uplifting songs and a very special appearance by the gifted tenor Robin Datta, whose voice echoed and tumbled joyously down the whole of Rutland Street.

Carolyn, our collector of East Marsh Stories, was out collecting those stories from people who live on the street and our plan to tart up the decrepid boarded up houses was simply astonishing – all these contributions from the Sun & Moon Festival of Community Arts, what a joy that is turning out to be even in these early days!

We also had a visit from the Absolutely Clueless @LucyLauraClark from Radio Humberside, who have also been supporting us via @Caeros01 and shiny new CEO @TheCarlWheatley.

It was all such fun, and we’re very happy about how it went, but we have to put the project aside for a little while as we have made a bid for funding to support a whole year of it (it’s not cheap to do this stuff!). However, now we’ve had a tryout, we can improve on the way we do it – and if you have any ideas for improvement, please contact us or leave a comment below. And here are Lee’s fabulous photos…

Volunteers needed for the first ‘Six Feet of Your Street’: Saturday 3rd August 10.00-12.00 – all welcome!

Our Community

What is Six Feet of Your Street? Here’s a taster…

Video by Annabel McCourt

Please come along and help in whatever way you can – or just come along and support us. We’ll gather in the car park of the Methodist Chapel, Wellington Street and Rutland Street corner from 9.45 and heading off to ‘Six Feet’ Rutland Street for the next couple of hours.

What is Six Feet of Your Street?

The idea is simple. We will encourage people to come out and clean their own patch. If everybody does this, then the whole area is clean. The plan is…

  • We will roll out our ‘Six Feet of Your Street’ campaign to one street on the East Marsh every month
  • This will be from 10.00-12.00 on every first Saturday of every month.
  • We will leaflet and door knock our chosen street in the week leading up to the ‘Six Feet’ day, letting people know that we are coming and how they might help us
  • We will encourage as many volunteers as possible to join us from across the East Marsh and from across the town – if people stand with us they are with us! We want to make a big splash on each ‘Six Feet’ day.
  • On the day, we will have our street cleaning volunteers armed with equipment and ready to help everybody and to clean where people are not able to – some people won’t be able to come and clean their patch, in which case we just ask that they come out and enjoy the morning with us and have a chat about what they love about our community.
  • We will hang out our hanging baskets.
  • We will have volunteers also from another East Marsh United project, the Sun & Moon Festival performing and being creative – ‘The Granarchists’, our nascent community choir, our growing arts collectives will be decorating the boarded up windows, and our storytellers and writers will be catching ‘East Marsh Stories’ from locals, as well as stories about their tattoos, which very often have a local flavour.
  • We will also be promoting East Marsh United’s projects more broadly as a way of bringing more people in to work with and for our community, as well as identifying one or two ‘community mobilisers’ from each street, people who have some heart and passion which we can foster in order to help them support their street in a continuing basis.
  • We will start each campaign event by gathering people together and singing a song: Bring me Sunshine…

In summary, ‘Six Feet of Your Street’ is a programme of community action whereby the community themselves are taking the action and transforming their neighbourhood. Self-help and engagement are at the heart of ‘Six Feet of Your Street’ and at the heart of all of our projects – let’s make change happen by making change happen!

Get in touch for more info: info@eastmarshunited.org or just come along on the day!