Bang in the middle of preparations for Pevfest came great news from local heroes, the Pevensey and Westham Transport Partnership, that they had achieved charitable status.
Friend of Bay LIfe, campaigner and co-ordinator of the scheme, Joyce Richards, told us excitedly ‘WPTLP has been incorporated as a registered charity with charity number 1142981. !!!’
The badge of honour now sits proudly in their site, where new timetables can be downloaded.
The partnership runs bus services in and around Westham and Pevensey, including Beachlands, Pevensey Bay, Hankham, Stone Cross, Langney and Hailsham. A travel pass is accepted on all our public transport services. The service can used by anyone, to go shopping, to get to our medical centres, to attend meetings at the village halls and to visit friends. All of the people involved in the scheme are volunteers, keen to look after you.
Their bus is wheelchair accessible as well as being easily accessible for all people with mobility problems and mothers with pushchairs. All WPLTP drivers are regularly tested using MIDAS (Minibus Driver Awareness Scheme), in addition they are all CRB checked.
Joyce also added a plee for new volunteers. Anyone wanting to join up to this pioneering and popular scheme can contact them here—01323 763344 or 01323 760496.
In another development, Bay Life, which reached the heady heights of 3,000 page views a day at the time of Pevfest, is to open up the pages of the publication to a space dedicated to the work of the partnership.
Information about the scheme, together with timetables, is to be made accessible to all the readers of the weekly news magazine on the web.
Simon Montgomery, editor of Bay Life, whose responsibilities now include five successful online community magazines across the UK built on similar principles, commented ‘Pevfest was an example of the pulling power of a really great idea for a community event and the pulling power of the web. I agree with people who say that it was a victim of its own success’.
He went on to argue ‘social media is changing the whole landscape of the web, almost overnight. It is a kind of revolution in terms of communication’. ‘ I want to see social media utilised for the public good, and that embraces the Pevensey and Westham Local Transport Partnership’.
In Pembrokeshire, where Simon also has responsibilities for a number of community publications online, Commissioner for Sustainability for Wales, Peter Davies, OBE has commented about the value of some of the innovations implemented with the words ‘Wales needs this kind of expertise’.
In what he hopes will be the first Google based community project of its kind in East Sussex, Simon intends implementation of some similar technical models to be made available to people within Pevensey Bay. This will include advice to the partnership in particular about how to integrate the new social platform, Google + into their services so that bus timetables can be made more accessible.
He went on to describe working in partnership with the publisher of Bay Life, Dianne Dear as ‘a joy’.
‘When Dianne first approached me with her ideas for Bay Life, I knew that I was listening to a pioneer. She has a deeply rooted sense of community and is one of the most valued members of the business network in the Bay. She had a vision for Bay Life, and we are beginning to see her vision turned into reality, together with the benefits that it can bring to local business.’
‘I expect to be able to implement some of her ideas in the coming year and together, our goal is to inject a new spirit to business life and some new ways of communicating right into the heart of the local economy…We lost the HSBC Bank last year, this is the New Age of Austerity and something must be done for the Bay. It is local people all over the UK who are beginning to seize the initiative, and Pevensey Bay Life is part of that movement….’
On the subject of the local transport partnership, he finished by saying;
‘You’ve heard of flower power, and acquisitive lootings’, he said ‘let’s have a bit of grey power and silver surfing on the local streets to really get the news wires buzzing’.
Further information about developments, the work with Google +, and links with the local transport partnership will be available shortly.
