A phone call from Faisal from Suffa Tul Islam to Phyl can be summarised as
We would like to do another litter pick, will you help us?
Sure, when?
Saturday, 14th?
Ok where?
Dallow Road, Meet at Brantwood Park?
Sounds good, what time?
2.30pm
See you there.
The event was set up, now to promote it and boy was it promoted on Social Media, the tweets were flying.
On Saturday we were already set up to go to another event in Denmark Close in the morning, but after seeing the flurry of activity on Twitter we agreed we had no idea how many might arrive for the afternoon event, so it was “Bring every scrap of equipment we have got“
We came across from the previous event and did a quick walk round to try and get a feel for what was needed (Grabbing a bit of Lunch as we did so)
Then it was time to unpack BOTH cars, as we were doing so we got a really lovely surprise.
Karen Linley, Community Champion for Tesco Dunstable, arrived, she had seen the Twitter storm, and kindly bought down a huge basket of fruit and bottles of water.. What a hero, this would be very welcomed a couple of hours later.
We finished getting the equipment out, ready for the start.
Then everyone started to arrive, we all got together for the Health and Safety briefing.
Then the equipment was issued, groups formed and we were off to tackle the surrounding streets.
People just kept arriving, getting equipment and then going out to form their own groups or link up with the groups that had already left, including Cllr Raja Ahmed who represents the Dallow ward.
Our friends from the Luton Council Enforcement team arrived, they had come out to investigate some black bags that had been dumped in Brantwood Road, to try and find some evidence for who they belonged to.
Soon full bags of rubbish were being returned and further empty bags issued, slowly the very hot and tired but happy groups returned, to have a mini picnic and mingle. It was then we noticed.. we were missing a few people.
Faisal and Cllr Ahmed had got a little carried away and lost track of the time as they cleaned along the edge of the park.
We all sat around and took a well-earned rest..
The bags were collected together and prepared ready for Luton Council Street Team to pick up.
As we had almost finished loading up the cars up to finish for the day, the Street Team arrived, so we just had to have a quick chat with these true heroes, that work every day to #KeepLutonTidy and help them load up the van.
