VILLAGES FORUM

[Tom Doncaster]

VILLAGES FORUM AGM 2010 - 27TH SEPTEMBER 2010 AT HOLY TRINITY CHURCH.
The Community Forum for Thorpe Hesley and Scholes is your community representative and support group and is attended by local councillors. It deals with issues of interest to Thorpe Hesley and Scholes residents such as improvements to Bar Park, protection of local green spaces, road safety, a new play area, the sale of the old play area, and funding for local groups amongst others. Please come along to the AGM on 27th September 2010 at 7.00 in Holy Trinity Church, Sough Hall Avenue, Thorpe Hesley. The forum is in danger of folding owing to you - the residents - lack of support.

Our villages are last on the list if there is any spare public money to be spent, so to get improvements there needs to be a pressure group - some monies you have to "bid" for! The new play area, such as it is (there always seems to be kids playing on it when they are not in school) wouldn't have happened without the forum.

The Council is aware of your road safety concerns thanks to the hard work of the forum secretary and others in organising the questionnaire which went to residents where traffic is a danger.

Our young people want a BMX track. That won't happen unless we continue to press for funding.

As there is virtually no support for Thorpe Hesley and Scholes to move towards establishing a parish council, the forum is the best we've got - use it or lose it!

[HesleyAdmin]

Tom,

I think the lack of support may come about lack of information coming from the forum with respect to meeting minutes or even worse, residents not knowing that the forum exists in the first place. I know you publish your acheivements and activities in the Grapevine, but not everyone takes time to read the publication (although they should as the column writen by a certain poster to this discussion group always manages to raise a smile with me! )

I have offered hosting space via this site for publication of minutes and events and even went to the trouble of creating a page to hold meeting minutes (see http://www.thorpe-hesley.co.uk/TH_forum.php), but nothing ever came in the form of an OK from the group, so the page, for now, remains unlinked to the main site.

By all means feel free to advertise your events here and the page dedicated to meeting minutes is available should you still neeed it. One snag with this site is again, lack of knowledge of its existance and trying to get it advertised in local publications is either prohibitively expensive or met by lack of enthusiasm/interest.

Good luck with your attempts to drum up support, I will try to attend the September meeting, work commitments permitting.

Richard.