#Stonestown Initiative
Saturday 28th March 2020
So many times during the past season, we tweeted about supporting your local football team and, for anyone that came down to one or more of our games, it was an exciting time. We were top of the League for over six months until COVID-19 rapidly spread around the world. In a matter of weeks, it has taken us from enjoying a great home game against Dulwich Hamlet on 7th March to these uncertain times just 21 days later.
The road through this current lockdown phase and back to what we consider normality will be long and will impact on the well being of all our families, neighbours and of course our local community businesses.
As such, we are launching our #Stonestown initiative across our Supporters Club social media platforms to play our part in supporting our local community through these times. Of course, currently we need to be so aware of staying at home and social distancing so our initiative will evolve and focus on different areas as we move forward and as Government guidance on restrictions change.
Over the coming days, we will be looking to start launching elements of this initiative and will initially be announcing and promoting these through Twitter. If you want to be involved and aware of what is happening, please make sure you are following us over there (click here).
Some brief details of the areas we are looking at are;
Raising awareness of local businesses
Many traditional local businesses do not have a web presence and now find themselves struggling to make customers aware of their products and that they can offer a no contact delivery or collection service. We hope to build an online directory of these businesses with details of their products, pricing and delivery options (subject to social distancing and no-contact guidance). This would, of course, be at no charge to businesses.
Food Banks
Several local Food Banks are struggling with stock levels at the moment and this is likely to continue for a number of months. We are exploring options to see how we can raise awareness of this and provide a platform for the community to offer donations. We also hope to build a volunteer service to collect these donations for onward delivery to a local food bank (subject to social distancing and no-contact guidance).
Brighten our days
Over the past few days we have seen several personal trainers, yoga instructors and the like start to create more online content, both to encourage people to take time out to try something new and to promote their business and retain / attract new clients for when social distancing is relaxed.
We want to identify and host copies of videos made in our community on our YouTube channel so as to hopefully make it easier to support and raise the awareness of businesses in our community.
Supporting people in our community
The Government have launched a scheme for extremely vulnerable people to register, through which they will receive assistance with shopping, prescriptions, etc. However, over the coming months many people in our local community will need short term or one-off assistance but fall short of the requirements of the Government scheme. We are looking at what we can do to help them, perhaps through a volunteer program offering assistance on a no contact basis.
Useful links
We will be putting together and maintaining a web page of links to official guidance and useful reputable sites providing information and updates on the virus.
Finally, please take the time to retweet the tweet that brought you to this page so as to raise awareness of our #Stonestown initiative and remember to follow us so to keep up to date with developments.
Keep safe.