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Happy Lunar New Year to all colleagues who celebrated over the weekend. It's another busy week at Waltham Forest and I'm stepping into Martin's shoes for today's blog as he's enjoying some much-deserved annual leave.
Town Hall illuminated for Lunar New Year
As Martin announced on Thursday, we found out last week that we were successful in receiving £31million from the government’s Levelling Up fund to make much-needed improvements to Leyton Station and other projects in Walthamstow. This is absolutely fantastic news for the borough and will make a world of difference to our residents. Thank you to everybody involved in putting together our bids for this funding.
Equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) is something close to my heart and a big priority for us at Waltham Forest so I was pleased to be invited on the Local Government Chronicle podcast a couple of weeks ago to talk about my own experiences and the importance of EDI in local government which you can listen back to on Spotify.
As part of our work towards achieving equity for all our staff and residents I'm excited to announce I’m setting up a Equalities Board to drive progress against the ambitious public commitments we’ve made, to demonstrate senior accountability for doing that and to build transparency and collaborative action across the organisation and with our employee networks.
This week is Holocaust Memorial Day and today (24 January) we will be commemorating the victims and survivors of genocide with a number of events including tree planting in Highams Park before an evening event in the Council Chamber at Fellowship Square. Although this event is invite only due to limited space we will film and share a video with you next week. On Holocaust Memorial Day itself, Friday 27 January, the Mayor will lay a floral tribute at Fellowship Square's Anne Frank Tree at 11am which staff are welcome to join and the Town Hall façade will be lit up purple in the evening.
Martin will be back next week but before then I'll also be covering the all-staff meeting this Thursday at 9.30am where we'll hear from staff from my directorate. The invite should be in your calendar already; I hope to see you there!
Have a good week.
Shazia
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