News

We want to get a good audience for our showing of “The Age of Stupid”.

If you are able to display a poster for us, please download one:

We are holding a ‘Grow Your Own’ public meeting on Saturday 21st March at 11am, to be followed by a seed swap. The meeting is also for everyone living within the charity’s “area of benefit” to decide on updates to our constitution. We hope starting our seed swap as soon as it finishes will guarantee a short – and quorate – meeting. (I hope that doesn’t sound too much like bribery!).

• Find out how to grow potatoes in an old compost bag!
• Admire the ingenious uses local gardeners find for other people’s rubbish!
• Sign up with Brighton & Hove Organic Gardeners Group!
• Take away gardening goodies
• Free refreshments

Come along to the Hanover Centre with your friends and family to pick up some ideas and what you need to get started on growing your own for the least possible outlay. Café open 10.45 am to 1pm.

Please bring anything gardening-related you’d like to share or re-home (leftover seeds, seed potatoes, seedlings, plants, tools, books, seed compost etc).

This is the poster for the event.

We’re hosting a session at the Hanover Centre on Saturday 21st March for people who would like to grow more of their own food – in the garden, in containers or on the windowsill. There will be more details here and on posters closer to the day when we know exactly what we can offer, but we can promise at the very least a seed swap and refreshments.

This is also the date for our AGM. We urgently need to modernise our constitution, so we’ll be asking Grow Your Own enthusiasts to help us vote in our shiny new constitution too.

Venue: Workshops for the Imagination
Address: 75 Islingword Road, Brighton, East Sussex BN2 9SL
Tel: 01273 818325

Event title: “Hanover Day Christmas Card workshops”
Description: Join Alex at Workshops for the Imagination to get tips and ideas how to design Christmas cards. Then you can enter the Hanover Day Christmas Card competition, and you might win a fabulous prize. For 4 years and over. 50p per entry to competition. Please book.
Audience: Family
Date/Time: 25 October, 10am -12noon and 2 – 4pm
Cost: No admission charge
Event: Free

The Global and the Local
Guest speakers from trapese, the world family & transition towns, activities, visioning & nice food!

Live Music;
THE MANJINGA 7
RIGHTCHEUS GYPSY SKA

Saturday 8th March
Hanover Community Centre

5.30-8.30pm Workshop and food!
8.30-11.30pm Music, dance and celebration!

Workshop & food & music: £10 limited places!
Live music from 8.30pm: £5
for workshop bookings & info 07753 278 492
or email

Gaia’s Gals are our resident womens art group. During the May festival they will be exhibiting their work in the Small Meeting Room, which is situated upstairs towards the back of the building.

Gaia’s Gals meet on Tuesday evenings at the Hanover Community Centre (7.30pm – 10pm). The group is led by artist Sue Nunn.

The cost of hiring the halls and meeting room will go up from the beginning of April 2008.

Category 1

- will be scrapped altogether

Category 2

- £6 per hour Monday – Friday daytime [until 6pm], £12 per hour weekday evenings, £15 per hour weekends [2-hour minimum on Saturday afternoon]

Category 3

- £25 per hour at any time. Minimum of 2 hours in all instances.

All one off bookings and bookings that end too late in the evening for another to follow will be subject to a minimum charge equivalent to 2 hours hire.

Special Party Rates

Childrens Parties; 2pm – 5pm [to include setting up and tidying up] Hire fee – £30 for Hanover Residents or £36 if you live outside the Hanover area. The Deposit will be £36 (this is in adition to the hire fee and is fully fefundable after the event provided all is well.)
Saturday Evening Parties (only available to Hanover Residents) are from 6pm – 11.30pm [to include setting up and tidying up] Hire fee – £75 & Deposit – £75 (this is in adition to the hire fee and is fully fefundable after the event provided all is well).

Mediation, a way to resolve conflict that gives you the opportunity and support to deal with the problems you are experiencing in your community.

“The service was exemplary in showing how the relevant issues could be resolved.”

Brigton&Hove Independent Mediation Service

Creative Courses at Phoenix Arts Association in the new-year.

There are a wealth of exciting courses starting at Phoenix Arts Association in Brighton in 2008, including some brand new ones. The new-year is a perfect time to think about developing your creativity and the best way to do that is by learning from professional artists who are teaching the subjects they are passionate about.

In 2008 Phoenix Arts Association is running new courses in “Colour — Moods, Methods and Practices”, “Lime Fresco Painting” and “Seascape Photography” as well as continuing with popular favourites like “Super 8 For Beginners”, “Analogue Electronic Music”, “Metal Jewellery”, “Fine Art” and “Life Drawing”.

For more information visit the website (www.phoenixarts.org)

The 2008 courses leaflet will be available in January

On Saturday October 13th, shoppers in the George Street area of Hove were surprised to be offered home-made reusable shopping bags in return for a pledge to turn down at least ten plastic carrier bags over the following month.

It was part of a project called InTheBag which Rachel Papworth, from Bonchurch Road, has been running as part of a personal development course with Landmark Education (www.landmarkeducation.com). The course requires participants to run a project that inspires them and Rachel saw an opportunity to address the damage plastic carrier bags do to the environment. She says “Every year, hundreds of thousands of marine mammals, like sea turtles and whales, mistake plastic bags for food and die an agonising
death, from choking or blocked intestines. After their bodies have decomposed, the plastic is free to be ingested again. Plastic bags are a major source of litter and precious non-renewable resources are used in their manufacture, transport and disposal”.

InTheBag is designed to inspire local residents to make a commitment to reduce their use of plastic carrier bags and is a Brighton & Hove contribution to an international project. Morsbags (www.morsbags.com) was set up by Pol Morsman, from London, to get groups (or “pods”) of people around the world making reusable shopping bags from waste fabric.

Between July and October, Rachel has been getting together with groups of friends and family for sewing sessions while Pam Chapman, from Southampton Street, spotted one of Rachel’s requests for resources on freecycle and volunteered to produce about 20 bags with her friends. The groups have made over 120 bags so far, using resources (fabric, thread, loans of sewing machines, iron-on labels to put the morsbags URL on the bags) gathered mostly from freecycle (www.freecycle.org). The youngest bag-maker to date was eight and the oldest 66. Three generations of Rachel’s family sewed together. Rachel says “I was blown away by the response to the project both from my friends and family and from Brighton’s incredible freecycle community”.