Friday 21st October, 2016 at 11:30am
This Saturday’s Community Champion is Julie Philips.
Julie is a Neighbourhood Improvement Volunteer and is the driving force behind The ‘Summerston Sparklers’ which is actively involved in regular litter picking throughout Summerston.
‘Let’s make Summerston Sparkle’ is a call to all the residents of Summerston to make their neighbourhood sparkle again.
Julie has gained the support of the local community, with volunteers participating in regular monthly clean up events. The volunteers have made significant improvements to a number of sites in Summerston. Not only does Julie contribute a vast amount of personal time to address issues such as litter and fly-tipping, she also helps other volunteers in her neighbourhood to organise their own community clean up events.
She has gone on to establish a Facebook community page called ‘Let’s make Summerston Sparkle’. The page actively promotes volunteering, informs people of upcoming community clean up events and highlights areas that suffer from environmental neglect. She also advertises her clean-up events on Twitter, Streetlife and Wherevents.
Julie and the Summerston Sparklers have shown how effective social media can be for promoting events and reporting environmental incivility.
In giving up her personal to time to organise and support community clean up events to make sure Summerston sparkles, it’s not difficult to see why all of us at Partick Thistle, alongside our partners at McDonalds Maryhill, consider Julie a real community hero.
