Enthusiastic to do their bit for our local environment, last October village residents Jean and Roger Venables grasped the grabbers to lead our local litter pickers. Amanda Borrill finds out how it’s all been going.
Founded by Histon ‘super volunteer’, Cedric Foster, Histon & Impington Litter Pickers (HILP) have been ‘wombling free‘ across our community for around 15 years now. Things began small, with just a few helpers taking part on occasional weekends, but now it takes a huge spreadsheet to contain the 150+ long list of volunteers. These days the tidy-ups possess their own regular schedule; with streets assigned and the additional option for ‘tidy uppers’ to get out there with a grabber pretty much whenever works best for them!
In October last year, local couple and long-time members of HILP, Roger and Jean Venables, took over the coordination of this vital village service – telling HI HUB at the time “please forgive us if we do not meet Cedric’s high standards until we have been ‘through the loop’ at least a couple of times.”
Making the communications work
Six months down the litter picking road, I ask them have things gone better – or more rubbish than expected?
“It’s been going well, mostly”, they tell me. “We are greatly enjoying meeting new HILP’ers. Can’t say we have enjoyed creating a new email list for (almost all) the volunteers, working out why multi-addressed emails sometimes selectively fail to deliver to Gmail-ers, and learning Facebook for the first time”, they laugh. “But there is satisfaction in making the communications work”.
Jean and Roger have lived here in H&I since 2017. Both of them retired civil engineers, they ran their own consultancy company for around 35 years. “Our focus”, they explain, “was almost entirely on civil engineering projects with an overall beneficial impact on society, on research to improve the quality, reliability or positive impact of civil engineering. Much of this work addressed the environment & sustainability agendas, minimising adverse impact and maximising the gains. Volunteering has been a major part of our lives professionally and in our local community”.
And, it would appear, volunteering continues to be a big part of their lives in retirement. The co-ordination of HILP is no small task and I’m curious to know more about their future plans for the group. “We are working towards all roads, paths and green spaces having a least one picker”, they respond. “Many already have more than one. The next step will be to secure multiple pickers for more of the most-affected streets and to ask them to work in rotation to ‘keep on top’ of the problem as best they can. We would also like to make ‘Big Tidy Up’ events into more than mega-litterpicks and include major clear-ups of selected areas – for example accumulated leaves and twigs”.
A true community affair
One thing seems certain – HILP continues to go from strength to strength. The group regularly gets approached by local businesses and schools; with students from Impington Village College (IVC) joining the crew a couple of years ago as part of their Duke of Edinburgh Bronze award and frequent collaborations with the Keep Britain Tidy Spring Clean campaigns. In true community spirit, the HILP kit is also loaned out after the annual village fireworks event – making the onerous clean up of the IVC field faster and considerably easier.
Jean and Roger are clearly delighted to be leading HILP and when asked what they enjoy most about being involved in a community initiative like this one, without hesitation, they respond: “having a beneficial impact on the community’s environment”. And, I am in absolutely no doubt that Great Uncle Bulgaria and his fellow forward-thinking, environment loving, inhabitants of 1970’s Wimbledon Common would be 100% in agreement!
The next HILP village litter pick is on Saturday 7 June. Full contact details for HILP can be found here in the HI HUB Directory. Email Jean and Roger on rogerandjean@rjvenables.uk.
READ ALSO: Histon & Impington litter-pickers join in the great British spring clean and The big tidy up celebrates 12 years of amazing work
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