Public Meeting - A response to the riots and an invitation to the community

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Comment by Adrian Essex on September 2, 2011 at 0:12

I attended this meeting, called to unite the people of East and West Haringey in response to the riots originating in Tottenham.

In a great many ways the meeting was very heartening:

• the fact that it was called at all, not by some faceless unit of the bureaucratic machine, but by a small group of concerned individuals
• that news of it spread as far as it did - facebook, twitter and hyperlocal sites are probably almost as effective at spreading the word as was the gathering by the village pump and the travelling tinker
• that so many people responded - the number of chairs the organisers had put out was wonderfully inadeqate
• that such a wide range of people had responded - many were simply concerned citizens but representatives of Haringey bodies, churches and schools were also present, "middle aged" was the predominant group but there were also teenagers and pensioners, Crouch Enders were there in plenty, but so were residents of the East of the borough
• That so many participated throughout the evening - the format of the meeting was designed to encourage this, and it worked

A fuller report is available here

Comment by Adrian Essex on August 21, 2011 at 18:05

Andrew Thornton just commented on the post "A response to the riots and an invitation to the community" on Thornton's Budgens

 

We have had a really fantastic response so far and really looking forward to Tuesday; we'll be starting promptly at 6.30pm as we have alot to get through; do try and get there a bit before.

We would like some input into the areas we discuss in the form of some open questions. We'll be using the World Cafe format (see below). Pse can you post or send suggestions by the end of Monday. Here are some examples we are considering:

What called you to this meeting?

What is possible for a committed group of people in Haringey to do for our young people?

How can we offer hope and solutions to our young people’s future?

What do you perceive as the biggest obstacles?

What do you perceive as the resources available to us in Haringey/Crouch End /Tottenham?

World Cafe:
Participants discuss the issue at hand around their table and at regular intervals they move to a new table. One participant (the table host) remains and summarises the previous conversation to the newly arrived participants. By moving participants around the room the conversations at each table are cross-fertilised with ideas from other tables. At the end of the process the main ideas are summarised in a plenary session and follow-up possibilities are discussed.