To KEF members aand potential members
Keeping in touch
This is another go at refreshing and expanding the KEF contact list, as recent communications via the KEF website have not received responses and may well be obsolete, or going to the wrong person in your organisation, or disappearing into a spam folder.
Though KEF has been inactive for a couple of years we have been included in the Council's Covid Recovery Taskforce (Communities), and this seems an opportunity too good to let pass. But I would appreciate help and input from member-groups so that I can better represent the local green community and your group can contribute and be consulted as and when needed. Together we can help Kingston recover from this crisis in a more sustainable, greener way.
Below is the first questionnaire that the Taskforce has sent me, and if you have any thoughts on it do please let me know:
Strengths: What has gone well?
Development: What are you worried about?
Planning: What needs to be sustained, changed, delivered differently or started?
This may be the first of many opportunities for a joined-up voice for local environmental groups (for example I’ve just been asked to speak in a Richmond and Kingston Greenpeace Zoom discussion on the future of transport in our boroughs and the opportunity for a green recovery), so please do consider signing up or checking that you are still members of the KEF website and/or that someone interested will pick up messages sent from the eVoice website. Just click the Join Website button at the top of the KEF Home page. However, I think I will usually try to contact you via an email address, if you can send me the best one to communicate with.
If you are new to KEF and its resources, do please have a look at KEF’s website, and KEF Facebook group, where we share updates and concerns of general environmental interest - there may be a question or issue for you to take up.
Kingston Friends [of parks, green spaces, allotments...] Forum?
It would be very useful to have one or two umbrella groups that could speak on behalf Kingston’s green spaces. People have tried before to get the various local Friends of ... groups to come together with no success, but maybe now would be a good time to try again? It would certainly be helpful to KEF, as consulting individual park and allotment groups is beyond my capacity, and I know that the London Friends of Parks and Green Spaces would also rather deal with one Forum per London borough than with scores of individual park groups.
Host a community screening of David Attenborough’s new film A Life on Our Planet, FREE
WWF is offering community groups free digital screenings of the recently released David Attenborough film A Life on Our Planet, an opportunity to reach a wide audience (safely on-line) with an important message about biodiversity loss and the climate crisis from a popular figure. Community groups can find everything they need for free educational screenings – Ts and Cs, guidance through the process, discussion and publicity resources – at https://attenboroughfilm.com/screenings/.
Transition Town Kingston is screening it twice on Thursday 29th October at 7pm and Sunday 1st November at 4pm, but if you are a member of an educational establishment or any other group that could reach out beyond the usual suspects, do please try to persuade them to show it too.
Marilyn Mason, former Chair, current Coordinator