Observer Column 7 March 2025

It was fantastic to see Hastings full of people enjoying Fat Tuesday in the sunshine this weekend, the first of many festivals and events that we are so lucky to have enlivening the town over the year. The Unplugged session on Saturday saw dancers, ceilidh groups, bands and choirs weaving through the streets and playing for free at venues across the town. It was also great to see many people using their reusable plastic cups produced by pubs in the Old Town last year. Our ambition is to see a Plastic Free Hastings where no single use plastic cups are used at events, and I am grateful to the Albion Pub for initiating the reusable cup scheme and keeping it going.

Elsewhere in the town the sunshine brought out families to celebrate the achievements of girls’ rugby with the girls’ takeover event on Sunday. In 2022 Hastings did not have a single girls’ rugby team and we now have around 35 girls in Hastings actively playing and now moving up the leagues as well as the older girls coaching the under fives so also learning leadership skills.  This is thanks to the work of the Active Hastings team who do amazing work getting young people in low income areas included in sport, as well as working with older people to improve their health through fitness classes and weight loss groups.

In Broomgrove an Active Hastings coordinator has been funded for the past two years through the UK Shared Prosperity Funding and has been delivering activities including family fun days with partner projects which have been very popular and supported community consultation, street dance sessions, Pilates, junior Muay Thai and boxercise. This has enabled some great partnership working with health and voluntary organisations. The funding has also improved the accessibility of the adventure playground, extended the Broomgrove Community Centre including improved kitchen facilities and enabled a Social Supermarket to start up.

A social supermarket enables residents to join for a small fee in return for a set number of items per week. By charging a small fee the model becomes more sustainable and gives residents a level of personal dignity that is often missing when food is distributed in other ways. Local volunteers are already helping run the supermarket and are ensuring there is funding to keep the supermarket going longer term. This is a model we are keen to see rolled out across other areas and so the intention is to extend the project to Ore and work with residents there to identify what improvements they want to see. These projects have seen great partnership working between local people, voluntary organisations, the council, public health and the NHS as well as connecting into organisations offering support to upskill people and help them into jobs. The hope is that we can learn from the first two years of  this hyperlocal model to really empower communities and embed neighbourhood teams working together to improve residents’ lives.