To all our volunteers, partners, members and supporters, we hope you are well in these uncertain times.
Over the last few months the team at ASF-UK have been adapting our projects to the changing conditions brought about by Covid 19. Workshops and events have been postponed or redesigned appropriately to respond to the challenges faced by the communities we work with.
As a charity, we strive to create equitable cities, and as the effects of this pandemic unfold it is clear that the communities we work with are being disproportionately affected. We have been asking ourselves how to help in the moment, as well as what this might mean in the future.
From Freetown to East London, we are experiencing the integral role that community based organisations play in crisis. People are looking to the groups they know and trust to understand public messages and access support. One example of this has been seen in the informal settlement of Cockle Bay, Freetown where ASF-UK have partnered with the Sierra Leone Urban Research Center, Federation for the Urban Poor, and other stakeholders since 2017 to create a Community Action Area Plans. As part of this partnership, a new organisation was formed called Foundation for the Future. They have responded to the onset of Covid 19 by providing handwashing stations across the settlement and coordinating volunteers to run sensitisation efforts. There is more information about this and our other initiatives in our newsletter
We are committed to building the capacity of urban practitioners and communities to create more equitable cities. We recognise the way humans experience the built environment will change as a result of this crisis, and we hope that part of this change will be towards a more sustainable and equitable urban space.
Together apart - the ASF-UK Team