Alex Scott has long been a hero of mine. The number of barriers she’s smashed through in football, in media and in her life is remarkable. So you can imagine the sheer giddiness I felt when she came along to Laces to surprise the girls (one her day off which I might add, making her even more of a legend).
Thank you so much to the Female Lead for making this happen.
Five years ago today, Hackney Laces was born. Back then we had no idea what we were doing. I knew that my neighbourhood needed a football team for the high number of teenage girls that wanted to play. And I knew that I could find some space and rally together some friends to get involved. I didn’t know that we’d be inundated with players, or that more than 90% of our players wanted to be famous as their future aspiration.
Preach.
(H/T Matt Harmer)
Each year when I reflect on Hackney Laces, I’m still astonished we’ve made it this far. 4 years and we still exist! I hope that this feeling never goes away because there’s still so much work to be done. In keeping with tradition, I’ll share what we’ve learned over the past year.
In my last year of highschool, some friends and I volunteered at a soup kitchen in downtown Hamilton. One evening I served a man who said “You can only be sure of two things in life: one, you need to eat and two, you’re going to die. So be sure that when you’re older you work in the food or funeral sector. That way you’ll be sorted for life”. It was incredibly sage advice that I’ve never forgotten (and I do indeed work in the food sector now).
There’s a proverb that gets used a lot in community development: “give a man a fish and you’ll feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you’ll feed him for a lifetime.” Canadian based company Lucky Iron Fish inadvertently subvert this saying with their simple yet life-changing tool – a fish capable of supplying a family with 75% of their daily iron intake. By purchasing one lucky iron fish, two families in Cambodia will be given a fish of their own to drop into a pot whilst cooking, facilitating the release of iron into their meal.
The Little Free Library began as one man’s tribute to his mother, a former school teacher, and has since become a global movement. Todd Bol of Hudson, Wisconsin built a small replica of a school house, filled it with books and placed it in front of his house for friends and family to enjoy. Now there are more than 15,000 registered sites around the world, enabling anyone to create their own book collection for their community.
Hamilton’s Barton Street area is often referred to as a “red zone” by city authorities, community groups and press because of the prevalence of homelessness, high number of residents living below the poverty line and reported crime rates surpassing those of any other neighbourhood in the city.
The holiday season has become saturated with stuff. Shiny, new, novel stuff. Increasingly so, the spirit of giving gets lost in a consumption–driven, sale seeking madness, fuelled by cheap chocolate and festive flavoured hot drinks. We forget that a huge part of Christmas is generosity.
Spotted in Pacific Coffee this morning: a corner shelf full of preloved books. The books are part of a city–wide sharing initiative, known also a ‘book floating‘.