Clean & Green Board
The Clean & Green Board (formerly Clean, Green & Sustainable) aims to look after and promote respect for the local environment in Barking and Dagenham.
The look and feel of the built environment and the open spaces which link it always features highly in public consultation in relation to defining the satisfaction of the local community with the borough. It provides both people who live and work here, or are visiting, with their first impression of the borough and tends to define how they regard and describe it to others. Accordingly, we believe that the people of Barking and Dagenham deserve to live and work in not only a clean, green, and well designed environment, but one in which everyone feels themselves a stakeholder in preserving and enhancing for the future.
The key aims of the Clean & Green Board are:
i) To support the delivery of the Barking and Dagenham Community Plan priority 'Clean' with specific remit to:
- look after and promote respect of the local environment by ensuring our streets and public spaces are cleaner, tidier, safer and greener;
- raise a greater awareness of the actions needed to tackle climate change, with less pollution, waste, fly-tipping and graffiti;
- ensure that sustainability is mainstreamed across the partnership as highlighted in the Community Plan;
- reducing the Partnership’s carbon footprint and CO2 emissions.
ii) Act as a ‘think-tank’ for identifying new opportunities from feedback from the community highlighted in engagement and consultation activities
The Board has purposely set itself up to operate differently from the other Partnership Boards by holding its meetings out in the local community and themed around specific environmental issues and reviewing and challenging activity being undertaken and planned around those themes. A flavour of the Boards work is set out in the section below. I am confident that we can build on the enthusiasm generated over the past year to continue to raise awareness of and successfully deliver on our environmental agenda.
Darren Henaghan, Acting Corporate Director of Customer Services
Chair, Clean & Green Board
BACK TO THE CLEAN AND GREEN MENU...
What are we talking about?
Meeting - 21/01/10
The Board joined a selection of Infant and Junior School Children from across the borough as part of an environmental awareness raising event co-orgnaised by the Barking and Dagenham Youth Forum held at the Jo Richardson Community School.
The event featured a mixture of short films, slides, an environmental treasure hunt, a panel question and answer session and ended with an environmental quiz. A full evaluation of the event can be accessed via the link below.
The knowledge and enthusiasm displayed by the young people attending was both heartening and just a little intimidating. Questions such as Why do you keep building flats when families need houses? and What will Barking and Dagenham look like when it's finished?, gave the panel members from various environmental agencies as tough a time as anything chaired by Mr. Dimbleby or Paxman.
Meeting - 22/04/10
Our meeting on 22 April took place at the Millennium Centre, Eastbrookend Country Park. The focus was on delivery of our Parks and Green Spaces Strategy and co-ordination with the East London Green Grid, through fundraising, consultation and implementation of community-endorsed, transformational park improvement schemes, including:
- Abbey Green: The intention is to create a high quality and vibrant town centre park that is the ‘jewel in the crown’ of the Barking Town Centre regeneration and an appropriate setting for the heritage features that are of European importance
- Dagenham Washlands: River restoration, flood defence, access improvements and biodiversity enhancements in partnership with the Environment Agency and the Land Restoration Trust
- Mayesbrook Park: Winner of the Mayor of London’s £400k public vote, London’s largest river restoration scheme and climate change exemplar project in partnership with the Environment Agency, the Thames Rivers Restoration Trust and Natural England.
- Scrattons Eco Park: A low-key land-quality restoration scheme to develop this underused strip of land into a community resource.
- Valence Park: Landscape and play improvements in support of the Valence House restoration project.
Meeting - 15/07/10
Our next meeting will take place on 15 July at Barking Power Station with an agenda themed around 'Energy'.
Details of discussion will appear here in due course.