Raj and Rachel and I completed putting up a number of our carnival banners on Redbridge Parks. We were disappointed however, to see, that someone had decided to remove two banners from Valentines Park. This was on the same day we received a bizarre email form Redbridge Leisure services about the timing of our event. We have been planning the event for over a year now and have always stipulated a finish time of 20:00. It seems the council now believes that the Event is to finish at 19:00 with 1 week to go. This complaint adds to the ire our committee feels about the way we are treated by the council. You will remember no doubt, how they decided to change the location of our event last year with just two weeks to go. It all seems rather contrived and antagonistic, however, I will investigate further before making any hard allegations.

Emergency Planning

Here are images taken at the end of a 3 hour training session, run by the boroughs Emergency Planning Team. The Aim of session was to review our Emergency Plan, helping us with improvements for our Emergency Plan, Training us in better use of Radios and giving us emergencu planning experience via controlled scenarios!

Derek Hobday leader of the team took us through some very difficult situations, one of which was a tragic funfair accident. His presentation skills were implacable and his ability to use previous recorded incidents to advise us of possible issues - was excellent.

It was fun and rewarding and provided us with better insight for our event next weekend (5th and 6th September at Valentines Park). So do come along to an event that we have tried to mak as safe as possible...!

finally Police and Council have approved our procession

Today I am pleased to announce that or the second year running Redbridge Council will be organising a procession for our event. The police and council approved our plans, risk assessments and have started the work on our traffic management order. We still need floats for the procession and several requests for assistance have been rejected...this will mean a lack of Redbridge Floats will be visible at the event. Several Groups have expressed an interest and we really hope someone might be able to bail us out. If so please do cascade our request to any approriate people.

Redbridge Youth Services Summer UNI Programme

Today I visited the Downsall Centre at Aldborough Road South. In my role as Chairman of Redbridge Carnival I was invited to facilitate a learning session to the young 13- 21 year olds who were undergoing a programme on a pre-selected course in Event Management. I had produced a 20 minute powerpoint presentation with pictures and lots of interesting facts on the history and development of Redbridge Carnival, whilst also promoting the ideology and principles of our existing Redbridge Carnival Association:

Promoting Community Cohesion
Promoting Local Talent
Promoting Good Community Citizenship

The young people at the session posed questions on how to seek funding, how to promote an event, intricate questions about health and safety and policing issues and much more. I was pleased to be able to use some of my experience to provide some positive and useful information to the group before me.

The young participants are going to be planning, promoting and facilitating 1 hours worth of entertainment and an arts and craft tent at our carnival on the 5th September 2009. I wish them the best of luck for the future and believe having met with them...that the professionalism that exuded from them will result in one hell of an exciting performance.