Leith Community Gardens Boosted by Vegware Community Fund

Greener Leith is delighted to announce that we have been selected by Vegware as the first charity to benefit from their newly established Vegware Community Fund. The funding will allow Greener Leith to employ a sessional worker to support green fingered volunteers grow more food in local community gardening projects.

Alastair Tibbitt, Development Manager at Greener Leith said, "Earlier this year we held a Food Summit, that showed that we needed to make it easier for volunteers to get involved on a regular basis with community garden projects. This funding from Vegware will help us to tackle this problem, as we'll now have the vital resources we need to run regular work days where green fingered volunteers can get stuck in. We see a natural link between the work that Vegware does to help the food industry to adopt more environmentally friendly business practices and the work that Greener Leith does to help people to lead healthier lifestyles by growing and sourcing more of their food locally."

Vegware is an Edinburgh based manufacturer of environmentally friendly catering disposables and food packing. Greener Leith already uses Vegware Compostable cups with our pedal powered smoothie maker - as modeled by local Blogger Jeff in the photo above.

Joe Frankel, Vegware's Managing Director and founder is an advocate of sustainable business practice.

He said, "It's an exciting time for business in the UK - we want to step up to the mark of being both profitable and a force for positive change. Our goal is to provide simple and economic ways to minimise the environmental impact of the catering industry. We have laid the foundations for a successful and profitable business by working with large organisations, who typically have the resources and manpower to effect positive change. We are very excited to now be in a position to support organisations like Greener Leith who do a fantastic job of promoting sustainability on a local level.

More information on Vegware is available from their website at www.vegware.com.

Greener Leith is also keen to encourage local businesses to make the switch from plastic food packaging to biodegradable packaging as this will cut the amount of persistent plastic litter that blights our neighbourhood. Every time we there's a community clean-up event in Leith we find plastic food packaging comprises a large amount of the stuff volunteers end up picking up. However, we're not alone in Leith. For example, the Marine Conservation Society have seen a 110% increase in the amount of plastic litter affecting our beaches since 1994.

Any local food businesses interested in switching from plastic disposable packaging to biodegradable packaging are eligible for a discount, from Vegware, through Greener Leith. To find out more, please contact us.

Another 1300 bulbs bound for Leith

1300 more bulbs are bound for Leith after the City of Edinburgh Council confirmed that they're willing to donate bulbs for free to Redbraes Community Garden and Greener Leith. Volunteers at Redbraes Community Garden managed to bag 1000 crocus for their area, whilst Greener Leith will be splitting 300 daffodil bulbs between Persevere Community Garden and the Pilrig Park Berry Hedge.

These additional bulbs follow on from the 10,000 planted by volunteers in Leith Links, 3000 bulbs planted by members of the Friends of Montgomery Street Park, and we note that council workers were busy planting thousands more bulbs in Lochend park this week too. All in all, that's going to add up to a lot more flowers next spring.

If you'd like to help plant them - please contact us.

Festive Spirit extends along Leith Walk

Two extra Christmas trees have been erected on Leith Walk at Elm Row and outside Shrubhill, courtesy of funding from TIE and the City of Edinburgh Council. We're sure both trees will help to bring much need festive cheer to Leith Walk over the holiday season.

Although the 'safety' barriers, drizzle and bins that surround the Shrubhill tree in the photo above don't do much for it, lights are still to follow, and it would appear local traders are nevertheless chuffed.

According to the Leith Traders website, Valvona and Crolla will be providing mulled wine and minced pies for the 'big' switch on, which is scheduled for Friday the 27th of November, at 4pm on Elm Row. 

Better get there early in the unlikely event that it turns out like Birmingham.

Buy Nothing Day Approaches

Join in the Leith Walk

Greener Leith is pleased to be supporting David, a local resident who has volunteered to help set-up a new walking group in Leith. He's set the dates for the next few walks. All of them leave from the 'big pointy thing' at the Foot of Leith Walk - and anyone is welcome.

Recently we've met a few, often older, people who say that they would walk more, but feel that some of the paths, like the one that runs up the Water of Leith path, seem too dangerous for them to use on their own.

So if you want a chance to explore your neighbourhood, and feel there's safety in numbers, or if you want to get into the habit of walking more for health reasons, or if you fancy it  just for the simple pleasure of doing something together outdoors in a group - please do put these dates below in your diary. These walks are open to all.

Also, you can help to promote The Leith Walk, by downloading this flyer and putting it up somewhere - in your local shop, workplace, school or community centre. Click here to download it.

@Greenerleith is nominated for a @Goldentwit Award

If you are amongst the many people who cannot see the wisdom in broadcasting a series of 140 character messages several times a day to people whom you've probably never met via Twitter then you can look away now.

Nevertheless, we've been using Twitter for some time now, and we've found it a fantastic way to get the word out about Greener Leith, and to stay up to date with news from other people and organisations. So, we're a bit surprised to see that we've made it onto the shortlist for the charity category of the Golden Twit awards.

The awards, organised by The Drum, aim to celebrate the best in twittering, and unlike other schemes, the winners are chosen by a jury made up of real people. You can help us win by voting for us on the Golden Twits website.

We're up against some huge organisations including The Woodland Trust, The Dogs Trust, Amnesty UK and Keep Britain Tidy. All of these organisations have vast marketing budgets compared to Greener Leith. Whilst they have undoubtedly out spent us, it remains to be seen whether we'll be out-tweeted by them!

In fact, the Greener Leith Twitter stream is a collaborative effort part produced by local Leithers. That's because we 'tweet' activity on a whole load of sites that Leithers use. These include local reports on FixMyStreet.com, new journey offers or requests on our We Love Leith Lift Share portal, and a weekly update on the latest activity on Leith's own social network. So, if you use any of these sites - well done, you're not just helping to make Leith Greener, you're also helping to put Leith on the social media map too.

The only question is, who's going to pay for us to go to London to the fancy awards do?

Free Earnest Marples!

The Royal Mail have taken legal action against a non profit service, little known outside 'techy' circles called Earnest Marples, shutting it down. You're probably wondering what Earnest Marples is, and why it matters. Well Earnest Marples was a clever little service that did a simple job for lots of other non-profit on-line projects. It allowed other people to send it a postcode, and it would convert that postcode into a lattitude and a longitude, so that it would be easy to plot the postcode on a map and do other things with it.

Now that Earnest Marples has been switched off, a free service called Twitter Plan that we really liked doesn't work anymore. It used to send us a message automatically every time a new planning application in Leith was posted on the City of Edinburgh Council website. Twitter Plan, was a great example of a non-profit service that made it easy for people all over the UK to participate in decision making about their local neighbourhood. It was built by volunteers, and was often a huge improvement on the service provided by local authorities, who in theory, have much greater resources to throw at these things, and should be setting up these services anyway.

Sadly, The City of Edinburgh Council doesn't provide a free local alerts system. So you can't sign up to get an email when a planning application is lodged near you. Now that Twitterplan is down, if you want to know about new planning applications in your area, you'll need to remember to go to the City of Edinburgh Council website every week and check through the 'Weekly List' of planning applications lodged with the council.

Twitter Plan wasn't the only really useful service that relied upon Earnest Marples that had been built by volunteers to improve upon government services. The brilliantly named "Job Centre Pro Plus" used to allow users to get email alerts every time a new local job vacancy was posted to the governments Job Centre Plus website. It's a simple idea, but try going to the government funded Job Centre Plus website and see if you can even get it to give you a simple list of all the jobs available in Leith, and you'll see how useful Job Centre Pro Plus was to people who are unemployed. Well, Job Centre Pro Plus doesn't work now either.

There were other non-profit services using Earnest Marples including ones that were providing live bus timetable information, a 'find your local hospital service' and one that helped people to find their nearest polling station.

So, we hope you'll agree with us, even if you didn't use any of these services, that perhaps it would be a good thing if the Royal Mail would allow non-profit users of post code data to get access to the information they need for free, as this would encourage geeks all over the UK to build all sorts of other socially useful websites.

If you do agree, there's a couple of things that the people behind Earnest Marples would like you to do.

Firstly, you could use another non-profit website that makes it easy to work out who your local MP is called WriteToThem.com, and you could use it to write to them to ask them to support Early Day Motion number 2000, that calls on the Royal Mail to provide a free license of the Postcode Address File for non-profit uses.

Secondly, you could also sign the petition that's been started on the number 10 website. You can find it by clicking here. And lest you think this all a bit obscure, and that no-one really cares, you might be interested to know that more than 2200 people have signed the petition since it was started, just a few weeks ago.

More information on the Earnerst Marples blog.

National Spring Clean 2010.

We know, it's not even Christmas. However, Keep Scotland Beautiful (KSB) have already opened registration for National Spring Clean 2010. Last April 60,000 people volunteered accross Scotland to take part in the campaign, clearing a truly stupendous amount of litter from Scotlands public spaces. Greener Leith helped to organise two clean-up events in 2009, in Pilrig Park and along the walkway from Easter Road to Seaflield.

We'll certainly be planning a community clean up event to coincide with National Spring Clean month. Our question to Leithers is this: Which area should we choose?

More information on the National Spring Clean 2010 campaign is available on the Keep Scotland Beautiful website. The website features pages for different types of group; as well as information about what you need to organise your clean up, competition and offer details, case studies from last year and an online map of registered events. If you want to register your own event, KSB will even send you a clean-up kit nearer the time to help get you started.

Holyrood enquiry seeks your views on active travel

At Holyrood, The Transport, Infrastructure and Climate Change Committee is holding an inquiry into walking and cycling in Scotland. Whilst Greener Leith has already submitted the results of our We Love Leith Travel Survey to the committee for their consideration, individuals - such as you - can also give evidence.

The questions that the enquiry are asking are:

Question 1	What more can be done to encourage people to change their travelling habits and walk and cycle more?
Question 2	Is enough progress being made in developing and delivering improvements in the uptake of walking and cycling?
Question 3	If not, what are the barriers to progress? (for example, lack of policy development, lack of political leadership, lack of funding/investment, the lack of prominence given to active travel in transport policy development, project planning and construction etc.)
Question 4	Why do walking and cycling policies set out in national, regional and local transport plans not result in a greater modal share for walking and cycling?
Question 5	What further action is required by the Scottish Government, local authorities and other bodies to ensure that significant progress is made in the development and implementation of walking and cycling, particularly if transport is to make a greater and more meaningful contribution to the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions?
Question 6	What can Scotland learn from good practice/successful implementation in other countries?

You don't need to answer all of them if you don't want to, and the parliament will accept a submission by email. More information here:

http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/s3/committees/ticc/inquiries/ActiveTravelViews.htm

Update on Monday, November 16, 2009 at 01:32PM by Ally

Greener Leith has submitted a response to this consultation. You can download it by clicking here. 

Cycling: It's not scary

Our We Love Leith travel coaches are not as scary as these people...There may be lots of scary things out and about on Halloween, but Greener Leith is determined to show people that cycling isn't frightening by inviting everyone to a "Cycling: It's not scary" event on the 31st of October, 2009.

As part of our We Love Leith campaign, we've given local volunteers the chance to get free accredited cycle leader, and bike maintenance training. Now the first volunteers have completed this training we're ready to run our first bike event. "Cycling: It's not scary," will be an easy, short cycle ride from the The Shore to the new Botanic Gardens Visitor centre - and we'll bring you back to The Shore again if you wish.

We plan to meet in the square opposite the Mal Maison hotel at 12pm, where we'll make sure that we give everyone a chance to practice their cycle skills (imagine a short 'cycle proficiency' course for grown-ups), and a free bike check before we leave. The route will be mainly on traffic free off road cycle paths, or low traffic roads. Everyone who takes part will get a free 'We Love Leith' travel map, and of course, there may even be a few We Love Leith bike bells on the go to.

Whilst you can simply turn up on the day, if you would like to come then we'd be grateful if you could let us know by contacting us.

Also, if you do come please bring with you:

• A bike!
• A responsible adult if you're over 18.
• Waterproofs, and warm gloves. (Lycra, or other kinds of fancy dress isn't required).
• A bike helmet.
• Bike lights - it may be dark by the time we get back.

Please also note that it is your responsibility to let us know if you have a medical condition that you think you, or someone you will be responsible for, may be affected by the ride. This could include, for example, diabetes, asthma, or a heart condition. You can simply tell the cycle leaders about any medical condition on the day, or you can tell us before hand, in confidence, using this contact form.

The bike ride will go ahead unless the weather is really bad. 

And lastly, for those of you who are over 18, we might take a little visit to Sofi's Bar afterwards - as there might be some really scary things in there.