PROGRAMMES AND SERVICES
Community Wide
TÚS MAITH
Fresh Start
Tús Maith / Fresh Start (TM/FS) continues to be an integral component of the TNMT, engaging directly with hundreds of residents each year and delivering home assistance, communal assistance, environmental awareness and educational projects throughout the Triax area.
Established in 2013 with the support of the now Department For Communities (DFC), it employs 4 full time staff and serves as a powerful tool in animating residents to become involved in environmental initiatives in their local areas, together with working in partnership with statutory agencies and residents to improve the physical appearance of the Triax Area.
It has also served, and continues to serve, as a mechanism whereby local people, many of them who might be described as “far from work”, can gain valuable work experience and on the job training.
In the past 12 months TM/FS, as well as carrying out more than 800 individual jobs including grass cuts, power-washes, guttering and rubbish removals, some of which are carried out for our most vulnerable in the most dire of states, have also played a pivotal role in the Triax Covid Community Response and Reclaim Your Lane projects, as well as providing logistical support to area wide projects such as the Gasyard Feile and the Christmas events.
PEACE BARRIERS PROGRAMME
The Peace Barriers Programme (PBP) was launched in 2012 in 6 interface areas in the North of Ireland and is funded by the International Fund for Ireland (IFI). Our own programme focuses mainly on the Bishop Street-Fountain Interface. It is aimed at developing and delivering a range of confidence and relationship-building interventions as well as social-economic improvement and capacity-building within and between interface communities to help residents reach a position where they feel it is safe and appropriate to proceed with the alteration, declassification and/or removal of Peace Walls and other conflict architecture in their area. We also take the organisation's social-economic improvement and capacity-building activities to the interface area. Across Northern Ireland, interface areas remain deprived which only fuels grievance.
Every two years a baseline survey is carried out on those residents living in close proximity to the interface. The information gathered from the survey helps guide our work within the project to ensure that we focus on those issues most relevant to residents within the Bishop Street and Fountain areas.
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For a snap shot of some of our achievements and latest activities, click here.
Upcoming events can be found here.
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BOGSIDE & BRANDYWELL INITIATIVE
The Bogside & Brandywell Initiative (BBI) is a community based organisation that was established in 1996 to help address the problems facing the local residents as they emerged from decades of conflict.
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Originally created as a community based coalition of 30 community and voluntary organisations from the Bogside, Brandywell, Bishop Street and Fountain areas the main challepoints that willnge identified at that time was the poor community infrastructure and facilities in the area. This, together with a commitment to explore the potential of community development practices to address the areas high levels of multiple deprivation, were the founding principles of the BBI.
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For the next decade the BBI lead the way in assisting individuals and organisations to address the deficit in community infrastructure in the area. This period witnessed the ongoing improvement of community facilities with the provision of new facilities and the upgrading and refurbishment of existing facilities.
As the above process progressed BBI’s focus became more resident oriented rather than group focused. In 2006, in consultation with then then Department for Social Development (DSD), the BBI merged with Creggan Neighbourhood Partnership, a similar organisation then based in the Creggan estate, and became the leading community development organisation in the entire area.
As our engagement with residents increased the BBI became more involved in environmental improvement schemes at both the residential and communal level. A major focus of this work was based on the broken window theory to improve the physical appearance of areas where people lived and worked, through the rapid removal of graffiti and illegal dumping and assisting individual residents in the maintenance of their gardens.
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This in-turn lead to the establishment of the Fresh Start / Tús Maith project, which has seen 4 environmental workers employed by the BBI operating as the Triax Neighbourhood Management Team (TNMT), to take forward the above work. Alongside the home assistance work the TNMT has also established a schools environmental project that has promoted environmental awareness and delivered physical environmental improvement schemes in community hotspots.