Vale of White Horse District Council update

Dear town and parish council colleagues,

Here’s our latest update with news and information from the district council.

Community Support work

We’re coming to the end of the third week of providing our Community Support service for members of our communities who need help and we’re pleased to report that we’ve been very successful in helping those who have contacted us in need.

In the first two weeks alone, we supported more than 324 residents, most of whom contacted us directly for help. These tend be residents that fall under the high-risk shielded threshold, cannot get help from family, friends or neighbours and are not connected to a community group.

The thing people need most help with is getting shopping supplies, followed by help collecting prescriptions.

We’re successfully working closely with the huge network of community volunteers who help us fulfil most of the requests for help we receive. We are connected with volunteers working in all but one of our towns and parishes and we wouldn’t be able to do it without them.

To keep these incredible volunteers safe, we prepared the attached guidance to help them go about their work safely, and to say a huge thank you, our staff produced a video of personal messages, which we sent to all of our community groups – you can watch here: https://youtu.be/-PcgotRHFao.

Finally, in the next few weeks we want to make sure as many people as possible who need the service can find out about it, so we’re running a social media campaign with some videos based on specific examples of people we have helped so far. Keep an eye on our social media accounts and please do share the messages.  Here’s our first post about it on Twitter and here’s one on Facebook

Access to our parks

We have a role in making sure the public are properly following the government’s social distancing guidelines – particularly when they’re in our parks, which we’ve kept open to allow people to do their daily exercise. 

The vast majority of our residents who are using our parks are doing so responsibly and following the guidelines, however there are few who still aren’t sticking to the restrictions, so we’ve come up with a creative solution to remind people of the rules.  We’ve used a special, harmless chalk-based paint to spray paint some reminder messages on the footpaths near our park entrances. The paint will naturally wear away in a few weeks, and we can wash it off quickly if the guidance changes.