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.
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.
