OVER the past few years, the Friends of Hardie Park (In Stanford-le-Hope0 have been trailblazers in providing a sense of community in the local park.
Their next venture is to site a building in the park.
A spokesperson said;
"We have submitted plans Thurrock Council to site a building in the park. This has been part of our long term vision and in a way has happened quicker than we’d hoped! The reason? Someone has donated a building to us!!
What is the building for?
Our vision for the park is for it to become a place with a hive of activity where the community can come together to do, enjoy and learn. We have proposed to take over the management (day-to-day running) of the park and recruit teams of volunteers to do this. In doing so, we can create a place for people to get together as well as all learning some new skills along the way and of course, this includes young people too.
So the idea of a building is to:
Provide some toilets in the Cafe during the daytime
Enable us to run a small social enterprise (a Cafe) staffed with volunteers and trainees to gain valuable working skills.
To run a bike maintenance workshop – associated with the skatepark – again, to teach people valuable skills but also to make a focus of the ever-growing wheeled sports which so many of our young people locally enjoy (and I have to say are pretty amazing at!)
Provide a training room and a meeting room so that we can offer formal training and counselling/mentoring/coaching support to the people engaged with our programmes.
"To provide a visible base for Friends of Hardie Park".
For further details, go to:
