Cultural and Art Activities
Over the years, Day-Mer has built a reputation for providing a range of cultural activities and classes to the members of the community free of charge. Currently three folk dance groups, two drama groups, a music group and a number of youth workshops are ongoing in the centre with continued interest and a satisfactory level of participation. Again, almost all of this work is not funded and is run by the resources of the centre and the energy and dedication of volunteers.
Information Stall at Park Festival:
Every year Day-Mer organise Art and Culture Festivals, this year our 16th Art and Culture Festival took place between 1st and 10th of July. There are many activities in the festival programme such as drama shows, youth celebrations, children celebrations, panels and discussions, exhibitions and park festival. The Children’s Celebration which is one of the festival activities, took place on the 2nd July at Grazebrook Primary School in Hackney. This activity was organised by our women’s committee and attracted mainly the participation of women. At this activity we held a recycling stand and gave information to the participants throughout the activity.
The Park Festival is Day-Mer’s biggest event, and it is the only Festival at Hackney which has been running continuously for the last 16 years. It is an all day event and thousands of people attend the festival area in the course of day. Many local organisations and service providers are holding stalls at the festival such as the Hackney Community Safety Team, Hackney Community College, Hackney Drug Action Team, and Local Newspapers to reach and give information about their services to the Turkish and Kurdish Community as well as local communities. Day-Mer is also holding stalls about their services at the festival. This year Day-Mer stalls included the recycling stalls, we gave information all day to the people who visited our stall and at the end of the event we distributed all the leaflets to the participants.
Day-Mer has an information network which is created by the active members. In order to inform our community about Day-Mer’s activities, from time to time we do outreach work and visit homes. Before the festival we visited a number of homes around Hackney, and subsequently a considerable number of people became volunteers during the festival activities. When we visited homes we update them about Day-Mer Projects and services and, gave those leaflets and other available information materials. This year we included recycling leaflet to our information pack. This was another way to inform Hackney residents about recycling schemes.
Working with Turkish Kurdish Football Federation:
Day-Mer is the only community organisation which organise sport activities as well as other activities. Turkish and Kurdish Football Federation is running a football league with 20 football teams. They play football every Sunday at Hackney Marshes. The federation organise team representative meetings each month, and they discuss football issues as well as other issues and they update them about services and projects which are run by Day- Mer. At these meetings we mentioned recycling project and distributed recycling leaflets. The Federation Management Committee is producing a weekly bulletin to update the league table and give useful information. A few times we distributed recycling leaflets with this bulletin.