The Newham Mosaic project is a journey and on the way we encounter people who, travelling in the same direction, make the path easier and more enjoyable.
Tee Fabikun
On Friday 13th Rose and I met with Tee Fabikun. Rose and Tee had met before years ago but I was please to re-introduce them to each other as part of the Mosaic project. There are many similarities, besides both being of Nigerian origin, both have run foodbanks for several years. I first met Tee back in the late 1990’s when I was associated with a group of individuals setting up a pioneering community Internet project on the Carpenter’s Estate in Stratford. Since that time Tee has been an icon in the neighbourhood and she serves the community five days a week collecting food from local stores an distributing it from the Carpenter’s Community Café on Doran Walk.
We discussed ways in which Tee might work with us as part of the Newham Mosaic project and came up with two ideas:
- We can work with Iroko (Drumming and Storytelling) to put on an event in late November at the Carpenters Café. This would raise the profile of both the Café and the Newham Mosaic project and would serve as a networking event at which we can offer a number of community building activities. I suggested to Rose that we might call these community building events ‘The HeArt of Community’ following from a lower key event that we ran earlier in the year.
- The community café has a computer suite and I suggested that that we could run a series of digital arts workshops. The Mosaic Project would provide the programme and tutors and look for participants while the café would host the workshops. We would need to check the computers and install software and work out thing in detail but if all goes well we could start running workshops in late January or early February next year.
The Cornerstone Cafe Connection
This is the Cornerstone Café opposite Memorial Community Church. Rose and I attended a PSBL arranged meeting there on Wednesday 11th and then returned on Friday, after our meeting with Tee, to talk with Lynn and Kate the volunteer managers about running fortnightly conversation/poetry/writing workshops or gatherings (the names are edging towards a description of what we want) that we will call ‘HeArt of Community’ workshops. These workshop/gatherings will start from November.
More Connections
After we left the cornerstone café we attended a drama group at Memorial Community Church. Zhenreena, a woman who had met just two days before, had invited us to this and we met Annie and Pam. We took part in the reading of a script that the group were working on. The play is about poverty and foodbanks – and so Rose made an instant connection with it. We agreed that we would join the group which looks both worthwhile and fun. We discussed with Annie, the facilitator (and new member of this group) the possibility of the drama group working with the Mosaic project. I look forward to firming up the connections and plans.