Project summary
The aim of the project was to gather members from the community of Bute town and neighboring communities to help clean the children's park, play areas and surrounding of the drug needles, litter, fly tipping, food wastes and other hazardous that was destroying the environment. The Bute town area of Cardiff is rich in history and culture, it significantly has lots of diverse groups of communities who have migrated from different parts of the world residing there. Over the past few years, the play parks and recreation areas have been used as a dumping site for litter, food wastes and other hazardous materials. The play area became unsafe for the children within the community and something had to be done about it.
Our approach
We set out our plan to help clean the Bute town environment working together with majority of local residents, youth leaders, teenagers, local radio station and the city council. We firstly had an open talk with key community leaders within the area to raise awareness of environmental issues around the area. This discussions lead to us creating a questionnaire survey which was distributed to residence about there opinions of their environment and what solutions they felt would b useful towards tackling them. We had 150 questionnaire collected within the area and had volunteers talk to youngsters who regularly use the play areas. The information gathered was use to create our clean up strategy. We decided to create a one day clean up event inviting residence, young teenagers and community champions to volunteer their time to cleaning up the area and treated everyone who has participated to an open barbecue within a section of the park.
Our achievement
The event was a success with a massive turn out of over 50 volunteers showing up and gathering over 55 large black bin bags. The volunteers who came for the event ranged from age 8- 56 years of age. The event showed the strength of the community and how much people cared about their surrounding environment once the importance of caring for their environment was emphasized . The area has remained clean and further discussion has been made with residents on ways of continuously improving the area.
