Harehills ❤️ Love

So, the Harehills Good News Advent Calendar 2021 is complete. I’m enjoying a well earned day off from blogging and my day job. Hope you’re all enjoying the day too, no matter what your faith, where you’re from or where you’re going.

I was inspired to create Harehills 🧡 Love because there was so much negativity about the area. Harehills has its problems, but it also has an amazing community of people and organisations that care. There was a lot of negativity left over within the media from the bonfire night problems a couple of years ago, and so this year, I decided, largely on a whim, to pull together good news stories and show Harehills at its best.

I’m no journalist, and non-fiction writing isn’t my forte, but given that less than 20% of the things written in the media are positive about Harehills, whatever my shortcomings as a writer, I’d still be one of the top positive writers about the area. Sometimes it takes a bit of bravado and self-delusion. I don’t deny that.

I also want to thank the Kinder Leeds festival, which planted the kernel for this idea in my mind back in October. In a couple of sessions there were questions about what we could do to add more kindness to the world – and not being the volunteering type, and donating money being a poor substitute for caring and kindness, (though by all means donate away, your local, national and international charities need your donations, and it does make a difference!), I decided that what I could do was shout about kindness, I could highlight kind deeds and actions. I didn’t know what form that would take, other tweeting and retweeting, but it found a form I hadn’t expected in the Advent Calendar.

I wouldn’t have made it to 24 stories without help, and support, even just kind words, (however bad I am at taking compliments, they were still appreciated). So thank you to all those that made suggestions, (especially Katie Bee and Yaseen Hassan), also thank you to Adam Aslam for giving me my first interview which introduced me to the lovely Breaking Down Barriers group, and for Leon and George who reached out to talk with me about Leeds Community Gambling Service.

So many people have liked, shared, retweeted and commented on the posts along the way, too many to thank individually, but you all genuinely have my thanks. I’m not great at this social media stuff, so I’d especially like to thank Karen Parnaby Harris who took on the issue to share the Facebook posts with as many groups on Facebook as she could, and it really had an impact on the number of visitors to the site.

Most of all, I want to thank all the people of Harehills, and its organisations – this advent calendar was a lot easy to do than you might first suspect. There are even posts that didn’t make it in, and I’m going to make a point of writing about those in the new year, as all the good stuff about Harehills deserves to be recognised. The advent calendar was just a framing device, after today I’m going to aim to post fortnightly, give or take a few days here or there, and I’ll bring the Harehills Good News Advent Calendar back for December 2022 – because it’s been fun and brilliant.

I don’t see a Harehills to be afraid of, I see a Harehills future to hope for.

You can find all the released Advent Posts here: Harehills Good News Advent Calendar 2021

One last thing, just because advent is over – these stories I’ve written, these stories that the people and organisations of Harehills have inspired, are still relevant. If you have a favourite, go through and share them, let others see the great things we have here.

Again, thank you, everyone.