Community Safety Task Group

Kensington Regeneration have been running and hosting the highly successful Community Safety Task Group for years now and Wendy, Liam and I are very regular attenders (with occasional attendances from councillors from Central and Picton but their interest, geographically, is only marginal compared to ours). Now that we are only 5 or 6 weeks away from the end of the NDC, we have had to make plans for its continuation, it is far too important to let go. So we have persuaded Venture Housing Association (where I am the Vice Chair of the Board) to take the group forward, adminstering to it and hosting it in the great community space on Boaler Street. We are also only days away from agreeing to merge the equally successful As One group (which works on funding diversionary activities for young people to keep them from committing anti-social behaviour and is also heavily supported by the NDC but also by us three on many projects) with the group.
We have also agreed to extend the boundaries of the group to include the L6 part of Kensington and Fairfield so we will cover the whole of our ward, Kensington Fields and Edge Hill. The latter two groups of residents attend the CSTG in large numbers and did not want to be left out. We three ward councillors have agreeed to carry on funding activities through our WNF or CCIF where bids are properly made for projects, even though they are not technically in our ward, because the geography is such that they feel closer to us and our residents than they do to the other parts of the wards in which they find themselves. Such are the vagaries of arbitrary ward boundaries.
I am looking forward to welcoming residents from the Molyneux, Phythian, Elm Park and Elm Vale to these successful very inclusive meetings in the future. It is really important that we maintain as much of the positive aspects of the NDC as we can, even after the partnership has dissolved.