DayMer Recycling Services
The
organisation recently completed a pilot recycling project with
the support of London Borough of Hackney. As well as conducting
work such as providing information stalls in local events and
door-to-door knocking of the Turkish residents of the borough in
order to raise awareness, the post holder also worked closely
with the council in devising strategies about reaching the
Turkish and Kurdish community. This unique service came to end
of its funding period with very encouraging results; an
application to continue the work initiated in the T/K community
is still pending, with a moderate expectation for success.
Click
here to see a power point
presentation of our recycling services.
With the support of London
Borough of Hackney Day-Mer runs a recycling project. The project
started at November 2004. The main aims of the project were to
inform Turkish speaking communities about available schemes
about recycling in Hackney for increasing recycling within the
Turkish speaking community and to develop appropriate literature
for a publicity campaign about recycling targeting the living
and working Turkish speaking community in Hackney.
Recycling is a new term for Turkish speaking community. Most of
the Community members came to UK in mid 90’s when the term for
recycling in Turkish did not exist. Because of that they would
need an introduction of this terminology before they are given
further information. The fallowing methods used to run a
recycling campaign among the Turkish and Kurdish Communities in
Hackney.
Door Knocking:
We employed 7 people to the door knocking team. They identified
the addresses of Turkish speaking resident’s in Hackney by using
different methods, and visited them. During their visits, they
informed the households about the recycling schemes in London
Borough of Hackney, and they tried to find out their level of
knowledge about recycling in general.
Engage Women's Group:
Women are still responsible for cleaning and the cooking at home
in the Turkish family structure. Because of this, one of our
main target groups is women. Day-Mer has a women’s committee to
enable the women to address their problems. Women’s committee is
organising breakfast meetings once every month at our premises,
and several women events throughout the year. Through the
contacts of our Women’s Committee we give information about
recycling and schemes available in their area. We attended their
breakfast meetings and had a presentation about recycling and we
held stalls at the women’s event to inform them about recycling.
Working with Co-Educators
One of the
services we provide for the Turkish Speaking Community is to support
Turkish speaking pupils via co-educators. Our Co-educators are
working at primary and secondary schools in Hackney to support
Turkish speaking students; part of their work is to engage with
parents of the students with which they work. We gave information to
the co-educators about recycling in general and the schemes in the
borough and they gave this information and distributed leaflets to
the parents and the students at their schools during the parents
meetings, and events organised by us and by the schools.
Information Leaflet in
Business:
Since the
Turkish and Kurdish Community began to take shape in North London,
one of the main ways to inform communities about current events,
activities, news etc. has been to distribute information through
supermarkets, restaurants, barbershops, etc which are run by Turkish
and Kurdish people. This is because these are the places where
Turkish and Kurdish Communities address their daily needs. All five
of the local Turkish newspapers available to the community are also
distributed in this way.
Since the
recycling project started we visited businesses in Hackney,
targeting especially the ones on the Kingsland High Street for
distributing information about recycling in Hackney. We chose
barbershops, furniture shops, minicab offices and restaurants as a
main target, because customers of those businesses have the time to
read what is left on the table or on the reading corner. We left
leaflets especially to the furniture shops too, because customers of
these retailers always ask the retailer to pick up the old furniture
when they replace with a new one. Picking up the old furniture
service is not available at most of the furniture shops and this
creates a problem between the retailer and the customer. The leaflet
has information for the Hackney residents, about collecting
furniture service provided by Hackney. This piece of information is
a solution to the problem. Most of the time, the retailer keeps
copies of this leaflet to prove this service is provided by London
Borough of Hackney.
Women’s
Literacy classes and ESOL class are among other the Day-Mer
services. Women’s Literacy classes run at Day-Mer until end of the
July 2005, and they were replaced by ESOL classes in October 2005.
At the end of the each week, after the lessons, we provided
information about one of our services and issues related to them. We
repeated information sessions about recycling with them a few times
after the project started at Day-Mer.
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.
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