The Manchester to Chorlton cycling and walking route is being proposed by Manchester City Council, the One Trafford Partnership, Transport for Greater Manchester and Greater Manchester Cycling and Walking Commissioner, Chris Boardman.
Running along Barlow Moor Road, Manchester Road, Upper Chorlton Road and Chorlton Road, the new five kilometre route will benefit local residents and anyone wishing to cycle between the city centre and the thriving Chorlton area.
Local residents, businesses, community groups and other interested parties are now invited to review the proposals and have their say at www.manchester.gov.uk/consultations.
Public Meeting: Wednesday 6 February, 6.30pm
Manchester Art Gallery, Mosley St, Manchester M2 3JL
Our buses in Greater Manchester are not working currently. It’s a wild west where companies do what they like.
Come to the campaign’s first public meeting to find out more about how we can win, and join the campaign to take action for better buses.
Speakers
Fatima Abid (University of Manchester Students’ Union)
Cllr John Hughes (Bus Driver and Unite rep)
Neil McInroy (CLES)
Luke Raikes (IPPR North)
Helen Rimmer (Friends of the Earth)
Chair – Jennifer Williams (Manchester Evening News)
There will be snacks, time to meet others from your local area and feel free to bring the kids.
We have a huge opportunity to make our buses better over the next year. Come along to join the fight against the fat cats!
Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/fight-the-fat-cats-lets-win-better-buses-for-greater-manchester-tickets-54601492534
Sign the campaign petition here: https://betterbusesgm.org.uk/
If you’d like to get more involved in the Better Buses for Greater Manchester campaign, please contact Pascale Robinson: Pascale@betterbusesgm.org.uk
Well it’s been a great year – those of you who voted for us have enabled us to start a new course around nutrition – and to ensure our community classes and activities/events for adults can continue at least until December!
The money raised will also fund a revised edition of the popular Whalley Range Community Directory:
We're nearly there!!! Fantastic work from Gary and Rik Moores of Moores Maintenance…just a few weeks to go before this amazing transformation is complete! ????
Work in progress…We're nearly there!!! Fantastic work from Gary and Rik Moores of Moores Maintenance…just a few weeks to go before this amazing transformation is complete! ????
Many thanks to Mick for organising the work from theISG construction company who have been supporting our project.
The team have knocked down the redundant chimney above the kitchen so that the work can commence…wet rot caused a few problems – but moving forward we are working with local building teams to get on with the work!
Many thanks to the team from Hyde Demolition who removed the chimney
Crescent Roofing who have patched up the roof ready for the next stage
Timberwise – roofing experts who came along to check out the roof for any issues
We are well on our way to realising our dream for our community kitchen!
We have now secured grants for a new energy efficient boiler from the Manchester City Council’s Neighbourhood Investment Fund…
and a new commercial cooker thanks to a grant from the Manchester Airport Community Trust Fund!
We have received a fantastic donation of ‘pre-loved’ stainless steel kitchen equipment and an offer to carry out some of our building work – from ISG – a dynamic construction company currently working in schools across Greater Manchester…
The Whiz project young people who are working towards their Duke of Edinburgh’s Award have recorded interviews with building users to find out their thoughts about the current facilities and the benefits of a new kitchen.
Listen to some of the interviews here:
Please Help!
We are struggling to feed and support our hungry community.
Our kitchen is a shambles and weve had to suspend lots of our vital cooking activities!
Food has always been a very important aspect of our work in terms of bringing people together, cook and eat: we have produced cookery guides and recipe books: our under 12 cookery class appeared on Ready Steady Cook!
We love Whalley Range and talked to residents about what they want – and this is what they said:
With a fully accessible professional kitchen we know we could meet these priorities – and more!
Since 1998 we have been based at the JNR8 Youth & Community Centre – the leased community rooms of
Manley Park Church – providing a range of inclusive projects for our richly diverse community.
There are 2 main charitable organisations based here.
Whalley Range Community Forum (WRCF) sources funding and facilitates daytime activities for the community and a weekly social and cooking group for people experiencing mental ill health.
Whalley Range Youth Opportunities Association (WRYOA) runs an evening Youth Club and holiday play schemes.
The Church has made major improvements over the past years: a new hall floor, energy efficient boiler and new double glazed windows and doors. WRCF has sourced funding for furniture, laptops and storage for the many groups who provide activities/classes.
We have decided to all come together to fundraise for a new professional, accessible kitchen to improve health & wellbeing. We named our project: Generate our Kitchen – as our building – JNR8 – is pronounced Generate!
With one part-time member of staff and a voluntary committee for WRCF and WRYOA – along with fantastic teams of volunteers and sessional youth workers – we are the only local centre serving the community with activities for all ages and cultures, providing crisis support and celebrating the area by bringing people together to improve mental and physical health and wellbeing and raising aspirations.
Based on consultations at our events we aim to:
Help reduce isolation by providing social groups,
Encourage people to engage with others: Coffee mornings, Afternoon Tea, Support groups
Improve employability and confidence/self-esteem building
Provide ESOL support with English speaking and writing
Provide basic and improvers computer skills with internet access
Run Work clubs and Computer classes
Provide Youth provision and Play schemes including Duke of Edinburgh Award, Girls Night
Promote Healthy eating Health & Wellbeing and Fitness classes
Reduce the stigma around mental ill health
Provide crisis support including Hate Crime reporting centre and Foodbank voucher distribution
Thai Boxing
Tai Chi
Women Health
Age-friendly
Child Friendly
Hate Crime Awareness and International Women Day events
Debates
Book and film launches
Babies & toddlers groups
Meetings
Advice sessions
Something for the youngest to the oldest, the Celebrate festival at our community centre – along with a wide range of other activities for everyone of all ages in our richly diverse community!
We love living in Whalley Range and as a Community Forum we have talked to residents about what they want!
Cookery lessons
Meal budgeting advice
Catering courses
Cook & Taste sessions
Community Meals
Healthy meal ideas
Cheap nutritious meal plans
Heritage food courses
Intergenerational cooking
Learning about vitamins & food sources
Healthy nutritious meals for one
Family cooking sessions
A fully accessible professional kitchen
Practical ESOL cookery sessions
Production of a tried & tested cook book And much more!
The JNR8 Youth & Community Centre is the base for the Whalley Range Community Forum, Whalley Range Youth Opportunities Association Whiz Youth Project, Celebrate, Age-friendly Whalley Range & Chorlton and Whalley Range Mental Health & Wellbeing.
We lease the building from Manley Park Methodist Church from Monday to Friday providing a range of classes, events and activities including an evening week-day youth club and holiday play for children.
On Friday evenings the volunteer-led wellbeing group Time to Change meet up offering support and removing the stigma around mental ill health by running a social group with pool, music, Tai Chi, bike repairs and to prepare, cook and eat a meal together.
The Church provides regular fundraising coffee mornings and soup lunches for the community and they let the building out on Saturday evenings to Youth on Solid Ground for their weekly youth club.
Our groups love to cook and want to promote and share cooking and eating together to reduce isolation, improve skills and employability and to improve their health. We could provide so much more if our currently inadequate and practically unusable kitchen was updated and fit for purpose!
Representatives of the groups who share the building are applying for funding under the banner
Generate our Kitchen
Please could you help us by completing our survey to support our request for funding?
The survey is anonymous but you can add your details if you are interested in getting involved. Visit the Age-friendly and well-being marquee to read more and to collect a hard copy of the survey.
The JNR8 (pronounced ‘Generate) Youth & Community Centre is the weekly base for the Whalley Range Community Forum, Whalley Range Youth Opportunities Association (WRYOA) Whiz Youth Project, Celebrate, Age-friendly Whalley Range & Chorlton and Whalley Range Mental Health & Wellbeing.
The JNR8 centre is a fantastic community resource – and we run a wide range of activities during the week for all ages, including ESOL, fitness, confidence building and social and self-help groups for people to come together to reduce isolation/encourage participation and friendships.
Cookery has always been a big part of our community engagement at JNR8 (our under 12 group even featured on Ready Steady Cook!) and we have a long history of providing community meals and food projects including the Food 4 Us cookery toolkit, Heritage cookery projects and intergenerational recipe sharing.
We are currently fundraising to improve our kitchen – as many of our cookery and nutrition classes have had to be put on hold as the kitchen is not fit for purpose.
Our exciting plan is to access funding to turn our current inadequate facilities into a professional kitchen so we can resume all the regular classes – and provide so much more!
We run a work club under the banner Generating Opportunities: a professional kitchen will enable us to provide catering, cooking and nutrition classes to improve skills and employability and projects that use cookery to improve English
In addition we want to resume our shared community meals – such as the successful Come 4 Tea, Festive Feasts and share recipes from around the world.
The Building is lovely – fantastic multi-use hall, storage for our projects, a chill out room, an IT room for computer beginners and improvers, a classroom for learning, teaching, presenting, planning and meeting.
Now look at our existing kitchen…
And look at some of the fantastic projects that go on here:
Local resident Chris Williams is the Creator of the Anne Frank Project…
‘a chronicled storyboard in words and music called: ‘six million voices – one girl – and a diary’
“Having 2 minutes to talk about the Anne Frank project, made me think about the concept of ‘time’. 25 years ago, the Diary of Anne Frank was planted into my mind and gave me the idea to compose a short piece of music which I called a ‘Trilogy’.
It saved the day by supplying the impetus for the 1st music assignment required on a 4-year Degree program.
25 years later I picked the ‘Trilogy’ back off the shelf and began working on it as a project.
It took 2 years to compose enough music, create Synopsis’ wordage, gather extracts from the Diary, and gain permission from the Anne Frank Family Trust in Switzerland, to complete the writing of one C.D.
One year ago I launched the Music Disc and one month ago produced a companion audio ‘Talking Book’.
Anne spent 2 years writing her detailed Diary. She died 2 months before the Concentration Camps were liberated.
Anne’s story pierced my heart, because of the inhumane atrocities to which she was subjected; Anne’s story also strengthened my heart, because of the courage and tenacity with which she endured the horrors of her persecution.
Through this journey of the Diary of Anne Frank, I have been liberated from my own struggles as a victim of abuse and have found my own voice. The result is a chronicled storyboard in words and music called: ‘six million voices – one girl – and a diary’. The story will not end there as I continue to write and compose the Anne Frank Project, because Anne’s life is unsinkable. Thank you for listening.
Anne Frank was a 13 year old girl, living an ordinary life in Amsterdam, Holland.
Caught up in World War Two, Anne lost her life, but left behind an enduring legacy in the writing of her Diary.
During those turbulent times, Anne examined through words and in her thinking, to rationalise everything – the behaviours of other people, and in the party of hideaways with whom she was trapped inside a secret annexe for two years; and the actions of Hitler and his army of followers, of their attempt to wipe out the Jewish population.
Anne own personal feelings towards others, her adolescent mood swings, the daily grinding routines within the secret annexe, her love of nature, God and music, her fears of the unknown, the joy of love as she became aware of her fluctuating emotions for boys, her own self-recognition of developing from a child into a young woman; all of these aspects were recorded into the detailed expressions of Anne two years of Diary writing.
Although Anne was physically trapped and immobilised within the square footage of the secret annexe, she was always moving forward in her mind, through her rigorous and continued education; reading and learning were keenly structured into her two years of enforced hiding from the world. Through contemplation and reflection, dreaming and forward thinking, Anne was constantly maturing.
This ethos I have hoped to incorporate into the music, to make it a travelling music, a travelling experience for the listener, a progressive journey for and in the mind of the audience, encapsulating two predominant years of Anne life.
I advocate that the content and impact of Anne illuminating Diary gives cause to the expression of many manners of musical composition to be explored and displayed.
As for the profound significance of this abominable subject on victimisation, I have intended to produce a sincere and honest music biography of The Diary of Anne Frank.
And through my music, to remind the cause for peace, tolerance, and non-violence amongst all peoples, past, present and future.
Thanks for reading
Chris Williams – Creator of the Anne Frank Project
A Synopsis for each track is available. Be sure to click on the track or its photo.
Q1: How does the Celebrate Festival bring the Whalley Range community together? Q2: Why is an event that brings members of a very diverse community together important?
• An event which caters for all ages, young, old and in-between! One that has activities that are attractive to a wide range of cultures and interest groups. Something for everybody. One of the highlights of the Whalley Range year.
• By having music and stalls that appeal to several cross sections of society. Whalley Range has a diverse society, lots of religions and cultures and Celebrate Festival reflects this.
• it brings rich, poor, middle-class, working-class, young and old together and those from other ethnic minorities besides English.
• This is an opportunity for the vast number of small voluntary and community groups to showcase what they are involved in and promote theri activities. its a chance for neighbours to get together in an informal way. With so many people leading busy lives, its really wonderful to see everyone from across the community in the same place enjoying the activiteis, information sharing and each othrs company.
• Because it enables us to integrate and embrace and respect each others cultures. It also breaks down preconceived barriers by allowing us to share opinions and beliefs and make way for a harmonious society where we can all celebrate each others cultures.
• Community cohesion and integration must be encouraged to avoid people feeling isolated, abandonned and rejected. Events like this promote community cohesion.
• It gets people of all ages, backgrounds and nationalities to come together doing interesting things that they normally wouldn’t.
• People just end up in ghettos if not actively encouraged to mix at fun events like ‘Celebrate’.
• The celebrate festival is an integral part of our community. I have been going with my family since it started and my children grew up with it and now bring their children.
• Everyone I know in whalley range for years always kept may bank holiday free for the festival.
• The event brings all members of the community together and in all the years I have been there has always been a great atmosphere.
• the local young people all get involved as well and it gives them a platform
• In diverse communities like whalley range it is often not the case that people from the diverse range all get along. often the different groups are isolated from each other and never really mix. events like this are a good way to get people from the wide range of groups to talk to each other and share commonalities as well as celebrate difference.
• There’s something for everyone. It heralds the start of the summer. It reminds people that we are a community, and all equal. It offers information about events where people can work together to make Whalley Range an even better place.
• The answer is in the question. We need events like this to remind us that we all all equal and neighbours, and that Whalley Range is a great place to live, and to celebrate it.
• Groups and individuals from every part of the community get involved, and they all bring their families, friends and neighbours. It’s always busy, even if the weather’s not good.
• Because people can see that we all live in the same community, therefore we ARE the same community. Celebrate demonstrates this really well.
• It’s the only event of this scale where we really see people from different backgrounds playing and working together through the arts. Nothing else covered the whole of Whalley Range, and it’s the only chance many people get for an outdoor music festival (major ones are too far away or two expensive).
• For the continual harmony of the community. Without an event like this, I fear for future discourse through lack of joint activities; if this one goes, then what else will go next?
• It is the only opportunity to bring people together who are not connected to a particular school or religious group, and has activities and information for all sections of the community
• It helps celebrate what is good about this diversity, especially at a time of increased negative media coverage.
• The Whalley Range Celebrate festival brings together the local residents to create and showcase local and up and coming talent. It gives residents a chance to meet each other that would not normally and can result in building long lasting friendships in the local area.
• As a very diverse community, Whalley range can sometimes be quite fractured and so this event gives the locals a common focus and goal.
• It’s the only regular event that really belongs to everyone in Whalley Range. Whenever I go with my family we meet up with people we don’t often see and find out about stuff happening in the area. It’s great to see local talent performing too.
• If different groups don’t meet and speak to each other, it’s harder for the community to work together to solve problems like loneliness or antisocial behaviour.
• I think the Celebrate Festival brings people in Whalley Range community together by providing a event that is fun and enjoyable for the whole community.
• It gets people out socialising with people in there community that they may not have talked to before, allowed you to meet new friends (people with the same interests)
• It’s inclusive, everyone has a chance to get involved and it’s a chance to participate in free workshops
• Because we are all human beings and Celebrate brings human beings regardless of their shape or colour together to have fun and learn
The British Muslim Heritage Centre has been made a recipient of Her Majesty the Queen Award for Voluntary Service.
The British Muslim Heritage Centre (BMHC) is very proud that its work in building trust and finding common grounds between communities through shared heritage and culture has been recognised in this year Queen Award for Voluntary Service.
The unique UK national honour was created by Her Majesty to mark the Golden Jubilee in 2002 and to recognise the outstanding contributions made to local communities by groups of volunteers.
​Reacting to the announcement, Mr Nasar Mahmood Chair of BMHC said: “The trustees, staff, volunteers and supporters of BMHC are grateful for the recognition, which can only spur us all to strive even harder to build a stronger and more cohesive society. The BMHC is an organization of committed people, the vast majority of whom are volunteers, dedicated to this cause and have proven over the years that together we can achieve our aspirationsâ€.
Mrs Huma Ali, a volunteer on one of BMHC flagship projects Heritage Community Radio said: “The BMHC has given me the opportunity to serve my local community, develop new circle of friends and gain new skills in Broadcast Radio. I feel that my contribution conveying the message of peace is hugely valued by all, which boosted my confidence in many aspects of my lifeâ€.
Mrs Hanna Shafiq, a parent Scout Leader of the BMHC Scouts Group said: “The BMHC provides immense support and an amazing venue for the BMHC Scouts Group. It has enabled us to provide children with the opportunity to be part of a global organisation, the Scouts. Through our hard work, the children learn valuable skills which will take them into adulthood, skills such as: teamwork, time management, leadership, self-motivation, cultural awareness and commitment. We are proud to be part of the BMHC and we are honoured to learn that our volunteering has been recognised at the highest levelâ€.
With over 120,000 visitors a year, benefiting from a range of services, the BMHC always welcomes and encourages people to come forward and support the many community projects on offer, such as BMHC Scouts Group, exhibitions, community radio, and over 30 different initiatives supporting youth, women and other groups.
Notes to Editors
For further press information, please contact us on 0161 881 8062 oradministrator@bmhc.org.uk.
The BMHC is a UK registered charity. Registered Charity Number: 1110104
