Breaking Boundaries Community Celebration

On August 9th 2019, we celebrated the multicultural society we live in and focused specifically on the diversity within Edgbaston and Sparkbrook. Our celebration was delivered after almost a yearlong planning and recruitment of volunteers and was completely FREE to be as inclusive as possible.

The project began in November, where we had to recruit volunteers (community champions) who lived, studied or worked in the two wards and get them to attend a city leadership training event where they were taught and given ideas of how to bring communities together.

Following the training event, we held regular meetings with our community champions to design our project and pass a few ideas around the table of what our event could look like. The young people were at the forefront of the project and were aided by coaches to support them along the way. Once we had an idea pencilled down, we completed the application form for funding and waited.

Our application was approved! Now we could begin choosing specifics from equipment, to inflatables, to the different types of foods we were to have. Alongside this was the marathon walks we did once a week to tell other organisations and religious places of worship about our event and aims.

Finally, the day of the event. It was a slow start and we started doubting for a second whether we had chosen the right venue, day, time and then there it was. One parent and her two children, another parent with her one kid and three nephews, another two parents and their two daughters and son and away we were, before you knew it the sports hall was full, the bouncy castle was heaving and the food was going, going, gone!

Talking of the food, we had breakfast, desi tea, English tea, full English breakfast, parathas and Chana and puri. Starters were available throughout the morning, samosas and pakoras, and mains were Shwarma and chips, Chicken and Rice, Lasagne and Vegetable Pasta. A wide range of fizzy and soft drinks were also available on request.

But aside from the mouth-watering menu the real aim was to bring people together who usually would not mix and we were successful in doing this by engaging children and parents from the south Asian, white British, black African and black Caribbean communities.

The real heroes of this event were our community champions, their energy drove this project through the rain, the cold and eventually shone through on a sunny August Day, so a massive thank you goes out to; Tayyba Hafeez, Israr Mohammed, Kashif Khan, Rohaan Mahmood, Usama Khan, Qasim Jaan, Atzaz Mohammed, Siraj Hussain, Naqeeb Mohammed and Fareed Mohammed.