Village Showcase

We were delighted to attend the Annual Assembly of the Parish and Village Showcase in Chinnor last night where members of GCC met councillors and members of many other organisations and businesses in Chinnor.  It was a useful opportunity to explain what we're doing and working to achieve, and find out more about other organisations and how we may dovetail our activities to ensure we don't waste precious resources unnecessarily duplicating efforts.
It was also an excellent opportunity to get feedback on what people think about our plans to help us understand how we might improve communications and provide the right information to support our activity. 
Thanks to all who came along.  If you missed it, you can see us again at FoE Swap Shop in a few weeks.  Click on the Events & Meetings page for details or sign up to receive our monthly newsletter (see Contact Us page)

Student volunteering for GCC

We've just agreed with the University of Oxford careers service to work with their "The Student Consultancy" programme.  This means they will be lending us a student volunteer who will be undertaking research and reporting over the next few months on transport issues around sustainable travel with particular emphasis on the M40 J6 Lewknor transport links.GCC is working with Chinnor and Aston Rowant PCs to ensure their input can be added to the project, and the student team has been briefed to consider the project alongside the Oxfordshire Local Transport Plan 2011-30 which supports community led approaches to travel improvement and the improvement of cycling and walking facilities.  This is an exciting development and we're grateful for the focussed project support.

Greening Chinnor – Spring Clean litter pick

On Sunday 1^st April a team of 16 volunteers from Chinnor and Kingston Blount carried out a community litter pick on some of our most popular footpaths and bridleways. These included parts of the Ridgeway and Driftway. We were extremely fortunate in enjoying one of the last fine days of the recent warm spell.  You now know what those people in the brightly coloured jackets and carrying huge bin bags were doing on a Sunday morning.

The group split up into 5 separate teams in order to maximise the amount of rubbish collected. The results exceeded even our optimistic estimates with about 25 bin bags full of recyclable and non-recyclable rubbish. Rubbish collected ranged from the usual plastic drinks bottles to the more unusual oil cans and parts of cars!  However, we were extremely disappointed with the sheer volume of dog mess which was left in a range of plastic bags either on the ground, thrown into ditches or hung from hedges and trees. We are baffled as to why anybody would want to do this! Some of the offerings were in brightly coloured freezer bags – is this to make it more attractive to children?  It cannot be due to the strain of carrying the bag to one of the dog bins as we found examples within 30 paces of the bins.

Anyway enough about some of our less responsible fellow citizens and a huge thank you to everybody who turned out – young and old – you know who you are. Thanks also to Jo and Liz from the Chinnor Parish Office who did all of the chasing up for resources and also ensured prompt collection of our waste. Our thanks to Biffa who supplied all of the kit.

Finally please watch this space as we intend to organise a follow up community litter pick in the early Autumn and will again ask for volunteers via the “Pump”