Could you pledge one hour of your time to Gorgeous Gorse Hill for the year 2020?

Finding enough volunteers, particularly for regular activities where we clear up our planted areas, is one of our biggest challenges. You really don’t need any experience at all, or to like gardening – just a willingness to help out and maybe get your hands a bit dirty (though we do provide gloves!).

We have regular activities throughout the year, or if you’d like to do things in your own time then you could adopt a tree pit on your street, or do some regular weeding at one of our sites in your own time. Or design us a poster?

Just head over to our Facebook page (search for ‘Gorgeous Gorse Hill’) and find the pledge challenge post. All you need to do is pledge in the comments and look out for activities coming up. You’ll need to be a member of the group to join.

Some activities are suitable for children but must be supervised. We’ll let you know on the event listing.

Mary

I’ve been the Chair of Gorgeous Gorse Hill for five years, Wow! Five years! That’s just sunk in. We started this group, essentially sat round a dining table talking about what we liked and didn’t like in Gorse Hill. We are just ordinary residents who’ve never really got involved in running a community group before. Five years on we’ve learned so much and done so many things in Gorse Hill, if someone had told me we’d have mosaiced 15 concrete bollards I’d have fallen off my chair.

But here we are, all still local residents, all still volunteers. Everything we do for Gorgeous Gorse Hill is in our spare time: funding applications, writing blogs, meetings, Christmas Fairs, planting 5000 bulbs, planting 1000 snowdrops, digging, weeding, painting, sweeping and there’s lots more.

When people offer to help us, or we win a funding bid, it is huge! Every minute of help we receive, and every penny of donations are incredible, making a huge difference to what we can achieve for Gorse Hill.

So, when we were chosen to be one of the Co-operative’s Community Fund recipients for 2019/2020 we were over the moon. This means that every member who chooses us as their Community Fund, who shops in their local Co-op and buys Co-op brand products, 1% of that goes to us. This is amazing and could mean a huge amount of money raised for us.

But to achieve this we need everyone to sign up as members and choose us as their Community Fund, then we need them to get their friends and family to become members and do the same. It’s easy to do that, just follow these simple instructions.

This is an amazing opportunity for Gorse Hillers to show their love and support to their local community group.

Ruth

I’m stepping down from the role of GGH’s Treasurer and I want to ask you for your help: could you be GGH’s next Treasurer?

Treasurer… are you thinking that doesn’t sound like something you’d be up for?

Think again 😊 I’ve been doing it for a couple of years now and it’s a pretty straightforward role. More importantly, it’s one of those things that you can do in 2-3 hours per month but it has a massive impact on keeping the wonderful activities of GGH going. The main responsibilities of the Treasurer are quite simple: mainly making online payments from the account, keeping a record of invoices and receipts, and tracking the group’s finances on a spreadsheet.

I’ve recently moved away so I’m not able to continue doing this role but I have such admiration for the work that everyone in GGH does that I am reaching out to encourage anyone and everyone who loves our fantastic community group to consider helping out by volunteering to be our next Treasurer – it’s a great way of getting involved, you will make a BIG difference, and you’ll be part of improving our community even if you don’t have much time.

Emma