Call for help – communications specialists to help prevent Travellers being evicted from their homes | Just Do It | Get off your arse and change the world!

Laura Hudson of Frontline SMS is looking for volunteer communicators to staff a communications hub and a few brave souls to support and observe on-site as families resist eviction from their homes. Read more about how you can help here:

You might have read about the threatened eviction of 86 Traveller families from their homes at Dale Farm, near Wickford in Essex:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/jul/27/dale-farm-essex-travellers-eviction

Time Out also covered the evictions last week, and you can read more here: http://dalefarm.wordpress.com/

If the evictions go ahead, this will be the largest ever in the United Kingdom. The contract to carry out the operation has been given to Constant & Co., a company whose brutal approach to their work has lead to investigations and expressions of concern from the ECHR and the Council of Europe, among others.

I am involved, in a personal capacity, in supporting the community to ensure that, if the evictions do go ahead, someone is watching. We will have two main jobs to do:

- as legal observers, watching for breaches of human rights and health and safety law, and feeding this and information about arrestees back to a team based outside the site, who will then pass the information on to teams of solicitors around the country who will be seeking injunctions to stop the eviction.

- as communications officers, recording what goes on in photographs, film and text messages and passing this back to the outside base to be tweeted, blogged, and fed to the media.

The 28-day eviction notice is expected to be up around the second week of April, and at that point, Camp Constant will be set up to provide round-the-clock support, as (contrary to police advice) the council have decided not to inform the community when evictions will start.

We need to build a roster of communicators who can be on stand-by to staff the outside base and join the teams inside the site when evictions begin. It’s a large site, home to hundreds, and we anticipate that evictions will go on for a couple of weeks at least. Wickford is less than an hour from London by train, and we can arrange transport from the station.

More broadly we’re always in need of people to help mobilise support and get the message out – the council are spending £10m more than they need to on this eviction, in a climate of cuts, and the health and education of the children on site will suffer. When people hear about this, or see it on tv, they can’t believe it’s happening in the UK. We should be doing more – can you help?

If you’re interested, drop me an email. We will be having an introductory meeting in London in March to explain more about what’s needed and brief you on some of the tech and processes we’ll be using.”

You can contact Laura at laura@frontlinesms.com

Tags: bailiffs, dale farm, just do it, travellers eviction

No Comments so far ↓

There are no comments yet...Kick things off by filling out the form below.

Leave a Comment

Click here to cancel reply.

via just-do-it.org.uk