A video produced by Sheffield Muslim Community Forum about the Food Bank Appeal.

Food Bank Appeal Up-date

Sheffield Muslim Community Forum and Darnall Forum have been working very closely with volunteers and local food banks for months to encourage one another, share ideas and work out how best to tackle some of the challenges of food poverty in our local communities. Great things can happen when like-minded people get together and work to build a cohesive society. 

God bless everyone who came out yesterday to support us and to everyone who donated food and cash for our Food Bank Appeal. 

Real donkey to head nativity procession on Saturday 19 December

Messages of Christmas 'Peace and goodwill to all people' and 'Good news for poor and oppressed people' will be at the heart of this year's nativity procession through Darnall. That hope has been kept alive by carols sung on the streets down the centuries.

Nearly 200 years ago, in Sheffield and many other parts of Yorkshire and North Derbyshire, the local carols, (with different words and tunes from the traditional ones), were seen as too much about the rights of all people to a better world for the local squires and industrialists to stomach, and they had them banned from the churches !

  

It is in the spirit of good-neighbourliness and hope for peace that the Darnall Churches invite people to sing along with our Nativity Procession - a new route from last year and this time a real donkey !

St Alban’s Church, Chapelwood Road  – set off at 2.00pm with stops for traditional carols on:

 Basford Street,  Balfour Road, Barnadiston Road, Gainsford Road, Ronald Road, outside The Terminus pub, Main Road,

to finish at Church of Christ, Station Road  which will be open for hot refreshments from 3.00pm

Small Business Saturday

Darnall Post Office is just one of 5 million small businesses across the UK. We're not owned by the Queen or the goverrnment. We're a non-profit organisation owned by the local community.

If you don't use your local post office, and your local shopping centre, you will lose it. Please support us and other small businesses. And by use us we mean please give us your custom. 

Buying stamps on-line, or franking your own mail and dumping big bags of it in our office, does not help to keep us open. How far would you have to go to post pre-paid mail if we closed? Handsworth? Attercliffe? Pond Street in town?

Find out more at www.smallbusinesssaturdayuk.com.

Not In Our Name!

Following the atrocities in Paris members of our Women's Voices group in Darnall decided that they wanted to say, 'Not in our name!'

One of the members of the group who decided to join in is a Christian and she said that the indiscriminate bombing of ISIS territory in retaliation for the atrocities is not in her name too.

Most members of the group didn't want to show the whole of their face on-line. Some were afraid they might be victims of hate crime. Some wanted to conceal their faces for religious reasons.

The Group said, "We are here to say Not in My Name because our religion is not a religion of terrorism, it is not a religion of war but of peace and co-existence."

S9 Food Bank Appeal Features on Radio Iman

Sylvia & Neil Hamilton from Living Waters receive the Donation from the team at Iman FM

Syvlia and Neil Hamilton on air at Radio Iman FM

Sylvia and Neil Hamilton from the Living Waters Christian Fellowship, which acts as the local depot for the Burngreave Food Bank in Darnall, spoke emotionally on Radio Iman FM about the support the Food Bank has received from all sections of the community, and particularly from local Muslims. Radio Iman itself has made a donation.

Future of the Clover Group of GPs' Surgeries

The future of the Clover Group, which runs the GPs' surgeries at Darnall Primary Care Centre and the Highgate Surgery in Tinsley, is in serious doubt. NHS England is putting the services which the Clover Group provides out to tender. The lowest bid is likely to win.

We realise that many people will feel that it is already too difficult to get an appointment to see a doctor or nurse practitioner and will wonder whether putting the Clover Group under new ownership might actually make things better! This is unlikely to happen, however, because there is less money on the table and the new owners could be a national or international group of doctors and investors who will not know anything about the needs of local people. 

We believe that the best way to deal with unacceptable waiting times is to talk to the Clover Group about this and ask them to make some changes, not to take a gamble that new owners might provide a better service.

The Clover Group has invested a lot of energy and resources in supporting local programmes that help patients to cope with diabetes, mental health issues, keeping fit and healthy living. This cuts down on the amount of time patients need to spend with GPs and nurses and saves money that can be spent on other important things. 

It is also exactly what NHS England have said GPs ought to be doing all over the country, to reduce the growing pressures on their services and make their resources go further. Unfortunately, all of this will be put at risk if a new owner comes in who is unaware of what has been happening.

The government has made it compulsory for the Clover Practice to be put out to tender, and there is nothing we can do to prevent this unless there is a change in the law. What we can do, however, is to ask NHS England to consult us about it first, so that the design of the tender can take what is happening here into account.

You can read more about this on Professor Mark Gamsu's blog. He is a visiting professor at Leeds Beckett University and a leading expert on involving local communities in public health.

Send us a tweet or an email if you live in Darnall or Tinsley and agree that you would like to be consulted. Better still, contact NHS England by tweeting to @NHSEngland or email  https://www.england.nhs.uk/contact-us/ . Tell them you have read Darnall Forum's blog and you support what it says and want to know when the consultation is going to start.