Plan a ‘Love Where You Live’ event
Invite your neighbours to share their favourite places and encourage people to look at where they live with fresh eyes.
![Card against loneliness - a card with 'What can you see from your window today' and a handwritten message below](https://www.edenprojectcommunities.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Card-1.jpg)
We can’t care about what we don’t have a sense of connection to – a ‘Love Where You Live’ event offers a way to notice, discover and appreciate local places.
What you will need
- Something to tag those special places with so other people can find them. You could use luggage labels, a piece of ribbon — anything so long as it can be removed without damage.
- Some advertising and a place to distribute the tags, or put them in an envelope with some instructions and post them through your neighbours’ doors.
- A few sample tags to get things going: tag a few places you love in your neighbourhood, it could be a tree, a piece of graffiti, a place where the light falls at a certain time of day, a place where kids can hang out and play or an old wall.
Instructions
1) Choose when you want to celebrate
it could be over a weekend, a week or for a whole month. The Month of Community, throughout June, is a great time to rediscover what’s special about where you live.
2) Start early
Advertise the dates well in advance.
3) Do a launch
Perhaps you could launch at your Big Lunch event?
4) Share your photos
Get people to take photos and post them on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook using the hashtag #lovewhereyoulive or #loveglasgow or #lovetruro (you might like to create a special social media account for your post code or community to follow.) At the end of the week or month remind people to take their tags away and do a clear-up to be on the safe side.
5) Create a space
If you fancy, create a central area where people can write their hopes and wishes for the area — whether these are tags around tree branches, post its on a wall or scribbles on a chalk board.
Small ways to start
You don’t need to start with an organised event, if that feels a bit daunting. Populate your community with notes about all of the things you love will make other people smile and foster a sense of pride. Paint some stones with positive messages and leave them around, or pop some postcards up on a community noticeboard.
If you’ve got a neighbourhood WhatsApp or Facebook page, just leaving a positive message for everyone to see can be the start of something exciting.