Last Friday, I was pleased to help organise a very productive multi-agency meeting at Wood Street Cowork in Old Town, to discuss serious and violent crime, early intervention, prevention, and diversion tactics.
I was encouraged to hear about some of the excellent work taking place locally as part of the multi-agency approach, as well as learning more about the projects planned for this year as a result of the £5.4 million in funding announced by Police and Crime Commissioner for Swindon and Wiltshire, which has been raised through the precept and grant funding from central government, as well as additional funding from the Ministry of Justice and the Home Office.
Local projects which aid safer communities and provide early intervention to tackle the issues of serious violence will benefit from support. These include Swindon Youth Justice Service, Premier League Kicks Project, which provides football-related interventions to young people here in Swindon, investment in youth mentoring services to support children attending alternative education provision, the community messaging system used by Wiltshire Police to communicate with communities and provide free crime alerts and crime prevention advice specific to localities, and investment into early intervention initiatives such as The Blunt Truth, which aims to educate children about the consequences of knife crime.
Our Community Safety Partnership here in Swindon are fully committed to tackling serious and violent crime, and it is great to see local business Nanogreen Sustainable Cleaning leading the way and offering their support to help tackle these issues, which affect us all.
By involving civic society and local businesses we can achieve so much more. Nanogreen are already setting a great example, and one of the company’s core values is to help those locally who are furthest from employment, including people with a disability, mental health issues, low education attainment, and those affected by homelessness and low aspirations.
I am very pleased that Nanogreen has already begun to inspire other local businesses to join them and provide supportive placements and work experience. If we can engage and involve the local economy as part of our work around prevention, early intervention, and diversion tactics, we can become even more effective and stronger in tackling these very serious issues.
On Friday evening, I was delighted to cut the cake at the Museum of Computing’s 20th Anniversary event at Swindon’s Central Library. Based in Theatre Square, this wonderful independent, volunteer-run museum was the very first physical museum of its kind in the UK dedicated to the history of computing.
At the weekend, I attended further enjoyable community events here in Swindon including Threshold’s Party in the Park at the Town Gardens, The Nepalese Association of Wiltshire’s Football Tournament at Buckhurst Field, and Swindon Goan Summer Festival at the County Ground Athletics field, where I was joined by Central Ward Conservative Cllrs Lourenco Fernandes and Anabelle Pegado and Cllrs Sudha Sri and Suresh Gattapur and many other friends. With grateful thanks to all of the community volunteers who worked tirelessly to organise these wonderful local events, which were enjoyed by many residents here in Swindon.
Finally, my charity of the week is Ambitious About Autism, a brilliant national charity with autistic children and young people at the heart of everything they do. Ambitious About Autism commission research, run campaigns and lobby decision-makers to make change happen. The charity are experts in autism education and run pioneering education services for autistic children and young people.
Following my ongoing work with Zurich and the insurance industry on Autism, I am delighted that Zurich and Z Zurich Foundation have launched a collaboration with Ambitious about Autism, which aims to transform the lives of thousands of young people. Funding from the project will provide resources to support the mental wellbeing of thousands of autistic young people in hundreds of schools across the UK. Ambitious about Autism will also provide training to UK-based Zurich staff to help increase understanding of autism. You can read more about this work here https://www.zurich.co.uk/media-centre/zurich-foundation-launch-collaboration-with-ambitious To find out more about Ambitious about Autism and how you can support this excellent charity’s work please visit https://www.ambitiousaboutautism.org.uk/
