By Mark McGreehin
This community journalist had an easy first day on the job for the Changemakers Coldside Pilot Project because the kids at Front Lounge ask all the right questions!
A few weeks past I was invited to attend the “Visible” celebration event at Front Lounge by project leader Chika Inatimi. Front Lounge is amongst so many other things a social empowerment organisation in Dundee with its roots going back to 2001.
At the event artworks by primary school aged children were on display in one room, with kids making cards filled with messages of hope alongside them. In another room a white outline was marked on the floor and was gradually being filled in with cobbled together trees, water features and paths…
These activities were all to celebrate the “Invisible Playground”, a project centred around the Coldside Campus playground, a mostly inaccessible grassed area in Dundee’s Hilltown. In the shadow of the now demolished Alexander Street multis this sizeable patch of land had once been a 5-a-side football pitch. Local families believe this space could be used better for children and nature and the gate shouldn’t be closed (which doesn’t stop kids clambering over it to play). But what would the community want from the space if it were re-designed? How could it be made visible and well used?
The “Working Group” of Front Lounge’s after school club for primary aged children “Adventures of the Little People” (AOTLP) took it on themselves to find out and champion the community’s hopes for the patch. The enthusiasm of the children drove everything forward and was in full force when I went to interview them at the “Visible” event.
The kids told me- or rather told each other as they took it in turns to be camera operators, interviewers and interviewees- about how they had packed “Hope Boxes” with art supplies: pens, paints, card, craft straws, sweeties and so on so that kids and families could create artworks of the fenced off area as they would like it to be.
One of the working group children recounted how between them she and two others had taken 93 hope boxes to school for their classes in Rosebank Primary and Dens Road Primary. A further 25 boxes were also given out to families connected to AOTLP. What would these 100+ children and families come up with?
The results were proudly on display in all their delightful glory at the Visible event. There were swings, ponds, sports pitches, forests and animal areas. These big hopes in miniature form helped communicate the overall hopes of the community, with 43 of them jumping for play equipment like monkey bars and slides, 31 yearning for natural touches of trees and plants, 13 banding together for team sports (appropriately enough mostly football pitches), and a sprinkling of quirky and unique ideas from the rest.
Front Lounge project volunteer Kerry Livie summed up these observations as “…I was amazed at how basic the things the kids wanted were. Some green space, somewhere to engage with nature, play equipment, a space to be creative and feel safe. These are basic kids needs which really should already be in place. They are not asking for anything too out of the ordinary!!”
As to next steps Manuela de los Rios, Garden Coordinator at the Maxwell Centre and facilitator of the Changemakers Coldside Pilot Project said: “This project has reinforced the idea of how important it is to work with anchor community groups in our neighbourhood.
Working together makes us stronger and more creative, it gives us a better chance to have more of a say in how our community spaces should work for us. It has helped us connect with Dundee City Council Coldside Community Team with a concrete project to influence the new planned project – an astroturf MUGA pitch - and how it can be complemented to ensure this space becomes a healthier place for children, community and biodiversity”.