Ay-up neighbours!

Since our volunteers’ meeting back in July, we’ve been busy working on important setup tasks for our community – that’s why things have been a little quiet. We wanted to give you a quick update on what we’ve been working on, what we’ve achieved so far and what we have coming up. 

The (Boring) Paperwork and Admin Bit 😮‍💨 

We were finding it difficult to attract grants, funding and donations (especially from our lovely community) without a bank account, but in order to get a bank account, we needed to set up as an official organisation. 

We’re therefore pleased to announce that we have now registered the Sherwood Dales Neighbourhood Watch and Community Group CIC (a very snappy title we think you’ll agree), where CIC stands for Community Interest Company. 

This allowed us to set up a CIC bank account. We decided to go with the Co-op as the account is free and was quick and easy to set up. In addition, we created a PayPal account which will help us to attract donations and pay for services in future. 

To add some context, we estimate that our main costs, for IT (more on this later), room bookings and leaflets and other printed materials come to around £1,000 per year. 

Volunteers Meeting – Follow-Ups 

In our volunteers’ meeting back in July, we identified the following priorities:

• Better engagement with local police and Nottingham City Council.
• Maintaining our streets, particularly trees, weeds and fallen leaves. 
• Concerns around speeding vehicles. 

We have finally managed to get a meeting with the local police, who have committed to share timely alerts with us when more serious crimes have been committed, and also provide us with monthly crime data for our estate. This will help us to focus our attention on the most prevalent issues and help us measure our success in driving down anti-social behaviour and crime. In return, we’ll be alerting them to any crimes we hear about to aid them with their investigations. With this in mind, do please let us know about any crimes you hear of on our estate. 

We have a meeting planned later this month with Councillor Dr Nayab Patel, so hopefully we can start to work more closely with the council following that. Updates to follow… 

Regarding maintaining our streets, rather than diving headfirst into action, we wanted to seek more feedback as to how we go about tackling these issues. Thank you to everyone who responded to our recent survey. This has now closed, and we’ll begin analysing the results this week.  

As autumn arrives and with the impact of leaf fall on our estate the council will be undertaking three street clearances over an 18-week period. We are currently trying to establish specific days for these so that we can make sure vehicles are out of the way. We plan to communicate these dates via our usual channels – WhatsApp, Facebook and emails, plus notices on lampposts. 

Finally, we plan to start thinking about the vehicle speeding issue in the new year, so expect another survey for that!  

If you would like to volunteer to help out with any of the above, or indeed any other activity that would improve the Sherwood Dales, please let us know. We would be especially grateful if you would consider acting as a representative for our community group on your street by becoming a Street Coordinator – this should take no more than an hour a week (often less). 

We took onboard your feedback that not everyone uses WhatsApp and/or Facebook, but that most of us do have an internet connection. With this in mind, we are hard at work developing a Sherwood Dales Neighbourhood Watch and Community Group web portal, which you will be able to access on any device with an internet connection. This will become an invaluable resource for the area, and will include newsletters, alerts, crime reporting, local events and much more. 

Donations 

A massive thank you to everyone who has donated to the group already. As mentioned above, we do incur costs in running the group. If anyone would like to donate, you can do so using the following bank details: 

Name: Sherwood Dales Neighbourhood Watch and Community Group CIC 
Sort Code: 08-92-99  
Account Number: 67447813 

Please use the following pattern for your payment reference:    
DON HouseNumber StreetName 

An example would be:
DON 17 Arndale.  [DON is short for donation.] 

All-Residents Meeting 

We are planning our first all-residents meeting at the end of November. Watch this space for more information. 

In Other News… 

Our volunteers will be distributing Neighbourhood Watch window stickers in the coming weeks, so look out for those. Feel free to send us a photo of your sticker proudly on display. Extra kudos will go to the most imaginative placements. 

That’s all the news for now. We’ll be in touch again soon, but please don’t hesitate to get in touch in the meantime if you have any questions, ideas or concerns. 

Tarrah for now, mi ducks!

Rob Mabbott and Steve Barker – Co-Chairs