Harehills ❤️ Love

 This blog post is now available as a podcast, in my dulcet Yorkshire tone (I'm not a great speaker), for those that have difficulties reading or just prefer to listen. It's available as HarehillsLove on Anchor.FM, Spotify, and Google Podcasts

After how well the rushed-out Advent Calendar was last year, I’m doing it again this year. I’m not good at blowing my own horn, so I won’t; the secret to the success was the amazing array of people, organisations and events there was scope to write about in Harehills and our adjoining neighbours.

So as we speak, I’m beavering away on the 2022 calendar. I’ve got many stories to be written and a few interviews to arrange and conduct, and I hope this year will be even better than last year.

The reasons for the original calendar haven’t changed this year; mainstream and legacy media still don’t get Harehills, overwhelmingly report the worst things of the area, and rarely mention the amazing, beautiful, caring, and fascinating people we have here in our community.

Preparing for this year’s calendar, I thought I’d look at another organisation’s record for reporting Harehills. It didn’t quite go to plan. I went on the BBC News website and searched for Harehills. I got 300 results, a strangely round number, but it turns out that’s all BBC’s search function ever returns. Anyway, I went through all the results, and out of the 300 stories, only 19 featuring Harehills in some capacity were positive (and had to stretch the definition of positive news to include an article featuring photos of Leeds in wintery conditions that had a decent number of Harehiills shots… ). That’s 6.33%. 12 stories were about the Leeds West Indian Carnival (which deserves positive attention).

I know other stories were about or featured the area in a more positive light, but the results were still a symptom of what we’ve all seen. The problem is that the bad news stories were overwhelming; the BBC search function reflected that more extremely.

So it has renewed my passion for keeping the advent calendar going.

I do need your help, though; I still have slots in the calendar, currently 9 to be filled – and this isn’t just my advent calendar, it’s for all the people of Harehills, so if there’s an event, an organisation, a person you want to be highlighted, something that adds positivity to the area, leave a comment here, reach out to me on Twitter or on Facebook.

If you don’t have ideas, don’t worry I will find awesome stories to fill the calendar, even if I have to bore you all with the nascent little garden area I’ve been developing this year. *hint* no one really wants that 😉