Although we cannot currently meet at our #TheFriendlyBench in person, we want to continue to encourage people in our communities to connect with each other, places and with nature, but to now do this virtually.
Therefore, over the coming weeks, we will be sharing ideas, resources and tips to support you and your community to virtually come together, some of these will be our own projects, others will be from our friends, community groups and other organisations across the UK and the world.
We will be posting these ideas on our Facebook Page @TheFriendlyBench under three headings: Connecting with people, Connecting with places and Connecting with nature.
Please do get involved and also feel free to share these with your friends, family, community and groups. Also, if you have any ideas or projects yourself, please share these with us too, tagging them either #ConnectingWithPeople #ConnectingWithPlaces #ConnectingWithNature
So, to give you an idea on the sort of things we'll sharing, here's our first example:
Connecting With People
Blossoming Friendships at The Friendly Bench
Due to the Coronavirus we sadly had to cancel our Blossoming Friendships at The Friendly Bench intergenerational project. So, to help keep the younger and older generations of our community connected through creativity and kindness, while socially distancing, we asked each of our Blossoming Friendship's children to share one of their creations with us - and this is what they did. Everyone in our Blossoming Friendships class drew a beautiful oil pastel message of hope and optimism.
We will be sharing two of these lovely creations each week on our Facebook page and would love it if you could share them online with your friends, family and wider community too, tagging #BlossomingFriendships#TheFriendlyBench.
We would also love it if other children created and shared their own creations with us, these can either be poems, short stories, art or craft creations - anything that shares a message of hope and kindness and can be clearly seen / read on a photo, again tagging #BlossomingFriendships #TheFriendlyBench.
To find out more about this and to get involved, visit: @TheFriendlyBench
We'll be posting more ideas soon, so do keep coming back... In the meantime, stay safe, #StayHomeSaveLives