The following partners have FREE resources available why not check out what’s on offer for your community.

Community Recycling Network www.crn.org.uk

Civic Trust www.civictrust.org.uk

Black Neighbourhood Renewal & Regeneration (BNRRN) www.bnrrn.org.uk

Black Environment Network (BEN) www.ben-network.org.uk

Greenspace www.green-space.org.uk

ACRE Action with Communities in Rural England www.acre.org.uk

Centre for Sustainable Energy CSE: Community Action for Energy CAfE www.cse.org.uk

You Can Make a Difference if you Get Involved! with the Brighton & Hove Federation of Disabled People

The Federation of Disabled People is looking to unite disabled people from across all areas of Brighton and Hove to improve access in the city and has achieved its first local landmark policy change.

Historically, disabled people were not allowed a personal assistant or carer to be with them in Brighton hospitals outside of visiting hours. This meant that an unknown person would be looking after the disabled person’s individual and often very specific needs.

Participants from the Get Involved! Project agreed that this issue needed addressing and worked towards making amendments.

As a result of this involvement, Brighton and Sussex Universities Hospitals Trust’s Privacy and Dignity policy has been amended to reflect the changes. Working personal assistants and carers of family members and friends are now allowed full access rights to the person they are supporting 24-hours a day.

Love Parks Week has teamed up with Fiskars Orange Thumb, a scheme which offers community garden groups the funds, tools, or materials they need to clean up and green up neglected community green spaces.

Fiskars Orange Thumb would like to help supporters of Love Parks Week to rejuvenate a lost or forgotten green space in celebration of the campaign. If you know of a disused or neglected piece of land that is currently over-run with nettles, brambles and other greenery, but you think would make a perfect space for your community to enjoy, why not nominate it as a Fiskars Orange Thumb project? Fiskars’ panel of gardening experts will select a project from the nominations and send a team of Orange Thumb volunteers and loads of great Fiskars garden tools to help you and your community to prune back, de-weed and dig over your green space so that it can be used and enjoyed by the whole community

If you are a member of a community group please circulate this information to your fellow members. If you work with community and volunteer groups we’d be grateful if you could forward this email to them.

Nominations for the Love Parks Week project should be submitted as soon as possible by following the links from the Love Parks Week website:

http://www.loveparksweek.org.uk/Fiskars-Orange-thumb.html

Plans are being drawn up to ban pensioners and the disabled from using their free bus passes on hundreds of bus and coach journeys, The Argus can reveal.

The Government is consulting on controversial proposals to remove coach journeys, such as Brighton to London, some park-and-ride services and tourist buses from the nationwide concessionary bus scheme introduced in April.

The move follows lobbying from the coach industry over confusion about the scheme, and its administrative costs.

Although not advertised, more than 100 National Express routes are registered as local bus services and as a result are included in the free bus pass scheme, according to research by pass users.

These include coaches serving Brighton, Eastbourne, Hastings and Gatwick.

Despite the lack of promotion, the Government estimates that 23,000 trips are likely to be made on coach services this year using the free passes and that the figure will rise steeply as more people become aware of the option.

Hello Brighton Freecycle Members,
Rob and I who have been running this group for years have been forced to find alternative ways of helping you RE-USE and RECYCLE your stuff. We are not the 'owners' of the Brighton Freecycle Group- we JUST run it 24 hours a day. We can no longer volunteer our time under the banner of Freecycle.
Thank you for making the Brighton Freecycle group the success it has been.
We are sorry that we can not continue under the Freecycle umbrella and hope you will join us on the NEW group we have set up.(There is no one left to run the official Freecycle group for Brighton.)
We have created a NEW group so you can all carry on as if nothing has happened :)