Back on the roster for SXSW London

Having had an amazing reception to our Educating Away Hate talk at the prestigious SXSW Edu conference in Austin, Texas, in March 2023 (pictured left), we are delighted to be back for SXSW London this summer.

The popular tech, music and film festival which started in Texas is making its London debut this year, and as we are London-based we are delighted to be involved.

Our founder Hadiya Masieh will once again be speaking, talking about the work we are doing to educate young people and parents about online dangers, as well as our work creating financial freedom through Bitcoin.

Check out more about SXSW London here and look out for more on our plans for the conference in this newsletter and on our social media channels.

Taking our mission to Number 10 

We were honoured to be 'at the table' when Prime Minister Keir Starmer met representatives of the Muslim community from across the country in February to talk about issues of growth, safety and opportunity.

Our founder Hadiya Masieh had the chance to talk about our mission to find, connect and amplify positive work in our communities, our innovative Community Connector programme and our unique online Kindness Mapper.

She also encouraged the PM to look at ways of improving community cohesion by increasing unity and tackling division across our communities.

We look forward to further opportunities to raise the profile of our work at the highest levels of government over the coming months.

Building links at Stronger Cities 

Team Groundswell was at the 10th anniversary of the Stronger Cities Network in Manchester last week.

We were privileged to be sitting alongside Mayors from the UK, Europe and the USA to take part in discussions on how we are helping to fight against hate in the communities in which we work.

As well as meeting many familiar faces, we also had the opportunity to share our unique Kindness Mapper with Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham.

Groundswell continues to support Kabaddi

Our Community Connector in Glasgow, Adeel, is on a mission to raise £5,000 for the Kabaddi Scotland team. This vital funding will be used to purchase mats for free training sessions in Glasgow, which are open to anyone eager to improve their health and wellbeing, whether they aspire to compete at an amateur or professional level in Kabaddi.

Glasgow proudly holds the title of the current UK champions, and we are dedicated to helping the Scotland team train for the upcoming 2025 Kabaddi World Cup (taking place 17 to 23 March 2025). Kabaddi is a remarkable sport with a rich history spanning over 3,000 years, uniting diverse cultures and religions as they compete in one of the UK's fastest-growing sports. This incredible game breaks down barriers and fosters community.

Please help Adeel raise these funds by visiting his Justgiving page here.

Mothers for Change course keeps growing

We first launched our Mothers for Change course around four years ago, and since then it has helped hundreds of concerned parents learn more about protecting their children from online dangers.

The course has become ever more important over recent years, as the dangers posed by the internet, and from extreme misogynist influencers, has grown exponentially.

Pictured are some of the participants in our recent Luton-based course, and we started a new session in Leicester last week.

Find out more about our Mothers for Change training and other training courses here.

Teaching young people how to counter hate

Alongside teaching parents about the telltale signs of their children being influenced online, we are also running sessions for young people themselves - thanks to funding from MOPAC's Shared Endeavour Fund.

The London-based sessions have been taking place at a range of colleges and other establishments across the capital, and include our Communities Countering Hate programme and Communities Countering Extremist Misogyny programme.

Highlighting similar dangers to our Mothers for Change course, these sessions importantly try to include young people in identifying the dangers and discussing the impact and their response to what they see every day on their mobiles and laptops.

We look forward to continuing to run these sessions over the coming months thanks to MOPAC and the Shared Endeavour Fund.

Festive fun in Manchester

We were delighted to partner with the Open Kitchen Manchester in Longsight at the end of December for a special multicultural community meal drop-in.

Many members of the community came along, and were joined by the local MP and councillors as our Community Connector Angela showed that festive spirit was in plentiful supply in Manchester.

Thanks to all our supporters who helped at the event or donated following our promotion of the event in our pre-Christmas newsletter in December.

We were delighted to once again support the vitally important work of the Open Kitchen in Longsight.

Connecting jobseekers and employers in London

Our Community Connector in Lewisham, Soxie, helped run the latest in a series of successful multi-agency job fairs in February.

The event was run in conjunction with Millwall FC's community team at the club's stadium and also included a stadium tour for the lucky visitors this time.

We will continue to publicise upcoming job fairs and other community engagement opportunities for people in Lewisham through our dedicated Groundswell Lewisham and main Groundswell social media channels. Watch this space.

Supporting equal access to sports facilities

Our Community Connector in Lewisham Sokhara Goodall worked throughout 2024 with others in the community to develop the campaign group Equal Playing Fields, aimed at gaining greater access for women's and non-binary football teams to community pitches in the south London area. The move came after claims that existing women's and non-binary teams had their bookings cancelled in favour of men's corporate teams.

The campaign drew the attention of Sky Sports News, who spoke to Sokhara and others at the end of 2024 about the unfair pitch hire policies in place at a number of locations that teams wanted to play at.

Speaking to the TV cameras, Sokhara said: "I would love to see pitch providers being held accountable. Community spaces need to be given to the community. I would love for schools or organisations who have pitches to say we are committed to a fair usage policy and want to make our community spaces diverse."

Watch the full video by clicking on the image.

Don't forget our mapper app

Don't forget that our Kindness Mapper is now available on a new web platform and we have also made it available as an app via the App Store and Google Play Store.

As well as finding out what's happening in your local area, there's a brand new feature that allows you to donate to organisations you support.

Lots of feedback we've received over the years has been that people would find our mapper easier to use in app form, so we are really excited to finally make that a reality. Find out more about the map here. Download for iPhone here and on Google Play here.