Dear all

Hope you all managed to stay safe during the floods last week. Another indication of the extreme weather events that will be increasingly common in future.

There is certainly no shortage of grim news out there.  

The good news is that responding to climate change is a win win for the majority of people on this planet.  And those of us who live in democracies have the opportunity to catalyse change.  Individual change is important (where possible) but what is even more important is making your voice heard - in your community, as a voter and as an active citizen.  Come and talk to us, join us and get active.  

We welcome feedback on this newsletter or any of our events and activities.  Please contact [email protected] 

Please note that because of the length of this newsletter you may need to click on a link at the bottom of your email to display the whole message.

Follow us on twitter @transitionchez or facebook.

November events calendar

Transition Chesterfield's events and activities

• Potato Day - pre-order by 23 November!
• Apple pressing events
• Make Do and Mend
• Eco hub events
• Inspire Community Garden
• Transition Chesterfield AGM
  
• LitterSorters
  
• Repair Cafe
• Seed Swap
• Planning update
• Report on Divest Derbyshire
• Report on Eco Homes events
• Report on Apple Day
  
• Report on Eco hub

Other organisations' events and activities

• Dr Bike
  
• Monkey Park Sewing Club 
• United for Warm Homes action
• Waste Not Cafe
• Better Buses Derbyshire action

Details of climate-related meetings and events happening in Chesterfield this month and early next month (note this list is not just Transition Chesterfield events).

Tues 31 Oct, 11am - 3pm: Apple pressing. Eastwood Park, Hasland. More details below.

Wed 1 Nov., 11am - 3pm: Apple pressing. King George V Playing Fields, Staveley. More details below.

Wed 1 Nov, 4-6pm. Dr Bike. Langer Fields Pavilion. Free bike checks by Inclusive Pedals. Details below.

Thurs 2 Nov. 10am - 3.30pm. Make Do and Mend. At old Massarella's Cafe (next to Tesco), The Pavements, See details below.

Fri 3 and 17 Nov. 10.30am-12 noon. Keeping Warm this Winter. Ecohub activity. More details below.

Sat 4 Nov, 1-3pm. Warm Homes Campaign. Outside Primark in Chesterfield market square. More details below. 

Sun 5 Nov (and every Sun 10am-3pm and Wed 1-3pm). Inspire Community Garden. Volunteers and visitors welcome. Seed donations especially welcome! Details below.

Sun  5 Nov, 6-8pm. Waste Not Cafe. Chesterfield Baptist Church. Details below.

Mon 6 Nov, 7pm Transition Chesterfield AGM. Now at The Hub @ 61 Low Pavements. Details below.

Tues 7 Nov, 2-4.15pm. Meeting on Home Energy pilot. Organised by Hope Valley Climate Action. Online. Register here

Thurs 9 Nov, 10-11.30am. Littersorters. Transition Chesterfield's monthly litter pick. Details below.

Fri 10 Nov, 10.39am-12 noon. Autumn growing and Seed Swap. Ecohub session, details below

Tues 14 and 28 Nov, 7pm: Chesterfield and North East Derbyshire Extinction Rebellion meeting. Meetings will be at Monkey Park, 128A Chester St, S40 1DN

Tues 14 Nov, 7.30pm. Cycle Chesterfield meeting. Contact [email protected] for details of zoom login.

Wed 15 Nov, 6-8pm. Meeting on buses.  With Stagecoach, Hulleys and MP Toby Perkins, organised by the National Pensioners Convention. Tontine Rd Community Centre, all weclome.

Wed 15 Nov, 7pm. Meeting of Climate Action North East Derbyshire (CANED). This month is a zoom meeting. Contact [email protected] for more details.

Sat 18 Nov, 10am-1pm. Repair Café. Chesterfield Baptist Church, Cross St, S40 4ST. Details below.

Wed 22 Nov, 7.30pm. Derbyshire Climate Coalition meeting. Contact Lisa via [email protected] for details

Fri 24 Nov, 10.39am-12 noon. Creative Climate Workshop. Ecohub session, details below

Transition Chesterfield's 16th Annual Potato Day will be on 27 January 2024. 

But you can pre-order your seed potatoes, onions, shallots, garlics, beans, peas and green manure to collect on the day. Pre-ordering gives you a discount to 'on the day' prices. It also guarantees that you can get the varieties you want.  We have over 30 varieties of seed potatoes this year including organic, heritage, blight resistant and unusual varieties.  

Pre-ordering is open until 23 November.  Go to: 

www.potatoday.org.uk

Please order online but if not possible you can request a list of varieties available and prices by email: [email protected] or phone 0783-4838076

At our 'pop up' shop on the day in the Pavements Shopping Centre we will have our varieties on sale, advice about growing and SEED SWAP.

A big thank you to all our kind apple tree owners, orchards and community trees.  We have managed to collect enough apples to run our apple pressing days as well as a weekly support of preserves to the foodbank through Polly. 

Thank you also to all who have helped and continue to support the Abundance project. 

We have 2 more Apple Pressing Days coming up:

• Tues 31st October, 11am-3pm, at Eastwood Park, Hasland
• Wed 1st November, 11am -3pm, at King George V Playing Fields, Staveley

Warning: Due to possibility of bad weather please check on social media whether these events are going ahead before turning up. 

Please contact [email protected] if you can help on these days, or deliver/collect equipment for the events.

Thank you to Katy who managed to find some young piglets that love the leftover very small and mashed apples.

Transition Chesterfield menders revisit the 1940s and show us what we'd like to see more of in the 2020s.

Seam come undone on your frock? Button come off your shirt? Your sweater has a hole and needs darning?

Bring it along and learn how to 'Make Do and Mend' with our friendly volunteer helpers at the old Massarellas cafe in Pavements Shopping Centre, next to Tesco. And while you're there, take a look at their overalls and aprons.

If you've never used a sewing machine or forgotten how, come along and have a go. No need to book, just drop in any time. Judy (pictured above) will also show you her lovely patchwork creations made from old sheets and tea towels. Bring some along yourself and see how it's done.

Help ward off the winter chill and use some basic sewing skills to make a draught excluder from donated fabrics and stuffing from old duvets. Or come and talk to us about some thermal lining for your curtains.

There will also be industrial thread and yarn cones for sale at £2 each or reduction with bulk buys.

We have a full programme of events at our new Eco Hub on Fridays. Join us just for 5 minutes or for every session from start to finish – you’ll be very welcome.  All sessions 10.30am-12 noon.

Fri 3 and 17 November - Keeping Warm this Winter 

• get free advice and tips on simple ways to save energy at home
• learn how to make draught excluders to banish cold draughts at home (with some available to take home free)
• come and try our healthy soups and swap ideas for recipes this winter

Fri 10 November - Autumn growing and Seed Swap

It may be grey outside, but November is a great time to start planning the garden for next year. Join us to:

• pre-order seed potatoes, beans, peas, onions, shallots, green manures for 27 Jan collection
• drop off and pick up seeds from our Seed Swap collection
• get gardening advice from experienced growers
• swap top tips with local allotment plot holders
• find out about volunteering for local community garden projects

Fri 24 November – Creative Climate Workshop

Feeling inspired by the possibility of a greener, more sustainable future? Explore your creative side at our pop-up creative workshop using art materials, Canva design and textiles. Can you help us to design and make Postcards from the Future? Or create your own artwork showing how you feel about the environment or climate change.

All events are free to attend and hot drinks will be provided. Sessions are at the Eco Hub@ The Hub, Low Pavements, Chesterfield (just along from Peacock’s Coffee Shop).

November in the garden: we have continued to clear the plots where the summer vegetables had been growing and sown various green manures like Red Clover, Grazing Rye and Tares. Tomatoes, Grapes and Cucumbers have continued to ripen this month.

Contact details along with when the garden is open and how to find us can be found here.

Please note Inspire Community Garden are a separate charity formed as part of Transition Chesterfield.

Please send a message via email if you would like to be added to their mailing list.

Our AGM will take place on Monday 6 November, 7pm, at the Hub on Low Pavements (just along from Peacocks Coffee Lounge). All are welcome to attend.

AGENDA

1. Welcome and introductions
2. Project reports
3. Secretary’s report
4. Accounts for the financial year 2022/23
5. Appointment of Officers and Committee (6 places available)
6. Revisiting Principles of the Transition Movement and 'visioning' discussion
7. Minutes of 2022 AGM and 2022 EGM (please advise in advance of the meeting if there are any issues you wish to raise, otherwise we shall assume they are approved).
8. Any other business
9. Close

Let's get litter sorted! Join us for our monthly LitterSort when we will be collecting, sorting, counting and recording the single use waste that ends up as litter in our parks and on our footways and cycle routes.

At last month's session, the group collected and sorted the litter and cleaned up broken glass from along the station link walk-cycle path. This added another 500 items of litter to our total collected so far this year. An especially large number of aluminium cans and plastic bottles were collected and sorted for recycling.

Wanted: Do you have a large wheeled trolley (the sort that people use to transport their camping gear at festivals) that you no longer need and could donate for use by the LitterSorters? Contact Kathy on [email protected]

New volunteers are always welcome. The group meets in Queen's Park at the green "superbin" near the cricket practice nets (what3 words:rubble.empty.post).

See LitterSorters page for further details.

The monthly Repair Café will be open again on 18th November. Our repairers will try to repair items including clothing, costume jewellery, electricals, electronics, tools and wooden furniture. If you would like to check if we could repair an item contact us on [email protected]. There will be a range of refreshments on offer too.

Due to Storm Babet and the resulting flooding issues in Chesterfield the October Repair Café was cancelled for the safety of volunteers and visitors (the pic of the iron is from the September event).

Any enquiries, contact: [email protected]

21st October was International Repair Day and, to commemorate this, a new Repair and Re-use Declaration was launched in the UK. Chesterfield Repair Cafe has added their signature to this along with other community repair organisations. Businesses, MPs and policy makers are all being asked to sign up too.

Appeal decision for Woodall Homes development

In September Transition Chesterfield spoke at the appeal hearing to determine outstanding matters on the Woodall Housing Development. The Planning Inspector has recently issued their decision on the appeal.  Read a Derbyshire Times article about the decision.

The Inspector granted the appeal, but has clearly supported the review mechanism, and the need for the various improvements the Council (and Transition Chesterfield) asked for.  For example, the inspector acknowledges that the need for improved walking/cycling infrastructure connecting to the development to ensure that future residents of the new housing can walk and cycle safely to and from the site. 

Whether these improvements are eventually delivered or not depends on how much profit the development makes. 

While we welcome the inspector's decision we regret that too often developers wrongly view walking and cycling infrastructure as an optional extra. It is essential that children and adults can walk and cycle safely to and from new developments, which helps reduce traffic congestion, carbon emissions, air pollution and danger for pedestrians.

Campaign group UK Divest have published new figures on council pension investments in fossil fuels. Click on the link for the dashboard where you can get all the info on your council's investments. This shows Derbyshire Pension Fund has £199m in fossil fuels or 3.8% of the £6.1b fund total.

Some of the fossil fuel projects the Derbyshire Pension Fund are invested in include Alberta Tar Sands; Amazon Oil And Gas Drilling; and Yamal LNG And Arctic LNG.

Use Friends of the Earth's easy online tool to ask your local councillors to publicly support fossil free pensions.

Transition Chesterfield is a member of Divest Derbyshire, a coalition urging the Pension Fund to divest from unethical and financially risky oil and gas projects, and invest in more environmentally and socially responsible projects. 

Contact Lisa via [email protected] for more details or if you would like to be involved in the campaign. 

Our October Eco Homes events - a free energy advice session, a talk on Greener Homes, and the Eco Homes Open Weekend - were attended by around 100 people in total. We hope we encouraged and inspired those people to take action to save home energy. 

Feedback from the home visits included the following:

"Just wanted to say what a great event.  Hilary...was able to give me loads of information and advice about solar roofing. "

"Many thanks for the visit to your house and all the information received since. I was much cheered ... as it encouraged me no end!"

Since then we have found out that specialist energy charity Marches Energy Agency (MEA) will be leading on a new regional project Home Energy Advice Team (HEAT), which will provide free support to homeowners in hard to heat homes (eg off-grid or single wall) who are willing to pay for improvements. The project will be launched this month and we have asked to be one of the partner community groups helping to promote the scheme.

Hope Valley Climate Action are organising a public meeting on this project on Tues 7 Nov, 2-4.25pm. Click here to register. 

Apple Day went well, in spite of the rain!

We were able to welcome lots of people to sample the juice pressed from our Abundance collection. People also brought their own apples for pressing and took the juice away to freeze or make into cider.
Quizzes and games kept families amused in the park. People also enjoyed learning how to make apple chutney and sampling some delicious vegan chocolate buns made with apple sauce as an egg replacement.

Organised jointly by Transition Chesterfield and Monkey Park

We launched our new "Eco Hub" project at the end of September. We now have regular use of The Hub on Low Pavements on Friday mornings to use as a space to meet, discuss, share ideas and plan activities.

Following an initial energy-saving advice session (volunteers pictured above with Cllr Martin Stone), we had four induction sessions in October. These have generated lots of thoughtful and productive conversations on the aims and principles of the Transition Town movement, aims and objectives of Transition Chesterfield and Green mapping.

The Eco-Hub now has its own webpage where you'll find a link to a list of the Principles of the Transition Movement.

For ideas and inspirational stories, you could also check out the national Transition website 

It's not too late to get involved - we still need more volunteers to meet and greet people and make them feel welcome, to tell them about Transition Chesterfield and our projects or to have conversations about climate change and what can be done to make a difference.

If you might be interested and want to know more, contact Kathy at [email protected]

Dr Bike workshops provide free bike repairs and adjustments. The workshops at Queen's Park have finished until March next year.  But you can still get your bike checked on the first Wednesday of the month, 1 November, 4.00pm until 6.00pm at Langer Field pavilion (next one 6 December).  All checks, adjustments and repairs are free.

We have a large stock of refurbished bikes available at the Langer workshop, all available for whatever people can afford as a donation.  More details www.inclusivepedals.org.uk

Inclusive Pedals is a social enterprise and is always looking for volunteers to help run their events, you can find out more by visiting their website www.inclusivepedals.org.uk

Monkey Park Sewing Club 

Sat 4 and 18 Nov, 10.30am-12.30pm

128A Chester St, Chesterfield S40 1DN

Monkey Park has a regular sewing club on the first and third Sat of the month. At the moment they are doing a patchwork square a month to make up into whatever people want. However people can bring along other projects of their own for upcycling or repair - bags, clothes etc. Check Monkey Park Facebook page for updates.

The cafe is now being run by Fairplay. Check Monkey Park Facebook page for current opening hours. 

XR Chesterfield / Climate Action NE Derbyshire / Friends of the Earth will be outside Primark in Chesterfield market square this Saturday 4 Nov, 1-3pm as part of their 'Warm Homes Campaign", to press for action to insulate and affordably heat the houses of our own hard-pressed, financially stretched neighbours. Join them for a chat, to reconnect, or maybe give out some leaflets and collect signatures to demand that our local MPs pledge government action for much more investment in Warm Homes.

No need to book! Just turn up on the night.

Waste Not Cafe is a monthly pop-up social eating cafe where volunteers cook up a 3 course vegetarian and vegan meal using surplus food (otherwise thrown away) from supermarkets. Attendees are asked to pay a minimum suggested donation and surplus food will be on offer to take away for a donation.

Social eating is all about bringing people together over food, breaking down barriers, creating friendships and relationships and tackling isolation and loneliness.

Waste Not Cafe donates profits to Chesterfield foodbanks at the end of each year.

Dozens of campaigners from across Derbyshire joined a day of action calling for Better Buses in October. But many of them struggled to get home at the end of the day from Bakewell due to cancellations of buses, underlining the importance of their protest.

The protests staged in Chesterfield, Matlock and Bakewell, were joined by local representatives from the National Pensioners Convention, trade unions, climate groups (including Transition Chesterfield), individuals, bus campaigners as well as local Councillors from the Labour and Green Parties.

The Better Buses Derbyshire campaign, part of a larger national Better Buses campaign, calls for reliable, regular and affordable buses in every town and village in Derbyshire. Campaigners are also calling for better regulation of the buses (franchising) as a first step towards full public ownership of the buses and better information at bus stops.

While the government has promised more funding for buses as a result of the cancellation of the HS2 leg to Manchester, the campaigners noted that the government’s new plan ‘Network North’ seemed to indicate 3 times as much funding for new roads as for buses in the Midlands.

The campaigners vowed to continue campaigning for more funding and better regulation to deliver a decent bus service throughout Derbyshire.  The Chesterfield branch of the National Pensioners Convention are holding a public meeting with Stagecoach and Toby Perkins MP on Wed 15th November, 6-8pm at Tontine Rd Community Centre. All welcome!

If you would like to help please can fill in here this short anonymous survey to give feedback on Derbyshire bus services.  

Thanks to Colin Harrison and Brian Lever for photos.  You can see the reports in the Derbyshire Times and on Politics East Midlands here.