Hillaballoo

What is the background to Hillaballoo? Where has it come from?

The Hill has a flourishing cultural scene, its highpoint being the Telegraph Hill Festival. There is also a range of events and groups running throughout the year, centred on its schools and its community centre. The Park has an active Users Group and it has recently been refurbished thanks to the Heritage Lottery Fund. In March 2006 some sole traders and home workers, from fields such as the arts, marketing, education and heritage, formed the Hill Business network. See http://hillbusiness.com

We talked about ways we could help forge better links in the community for mutual benefit, overcoming the isolation some of us felt of working from home or in small offices. At the same time, the Telegraph Hill Centre, Cafe Orange and St Catherine’s Church were embarking together on a development campaign to improve their facilities and to raise the aspirations of their programmes, aiming to reach more people in need. So, some Hill Business members have contributed to this by helping form a ‘creative community vision’. Moves have included:

• a Lottery funding bid for a community worker, to run a programme that is intergenerational and empowers participants to make changes,
• an agreement with Lewisham council to operate youth services in the Centre,
• plans to set up a Time Bank,
• more creative use of the Parks for youth and community activities,

Plus also,

• a community survey, using creative methods to elicit diverse needs and visions of the Hill’s future,
• improvements to Cafe Orange, a training cafe for adults with support needs, so that it can both attract more users and be a more effective learning space for its regular clients,
• a skills-sharing event to pilot the Time Bank approach

The three items above are funded by Lewisham’s Localities Fund and are being co-ordinated by Hill Business members Catherine Shovlin and Anita van Mil.

Hillaballoo is an event that will help to:

• gather visions of the Hill’s future to support the community survey,
• give us a taster of the skills and expertise around SE14, and of ways these can be shared in collaborative ventures,
• pilot creative and participatory ways of using the Park, and especially the view.

It is devised and organised by Bridget McKenzie (Flow Associates) in partnership with the Park Users Group and the Telegraph Hill Centre.

www.flowassociates.com