An oak sculpture trail for Furzedown!

Fio, wearing a crown of oak leaves and acorns, and Christopher, with a Red Oak buttonhole, celebrating after making a 2 minute pitch for pledges last night, to an audience in the spectacular hall overlooking the river. Wow! We were delighted to be awarded a £5000 pledge from the Mayor of London and £200 from Bulb. Many thanks! And thank you to everyone who has pledged: your support made the difference. We were proud to be in the company of 24 other excellent projects: so many inspiring people, ideas and stories. Check them out on the Mayor of London's Spacehive page: scroll down for the current ones. Having worked to get to this stage in isolation, it was very exciting to be surrounded by others going through the same thing, and feel part of a movement of projects that are catalysts for change across the city. We're a third of the way to our target, to make good the pledges, so lots still to do. We'll turn to local businesses now, and hope to make the most of these generous pledges endorsing the proposal.

Flyers are now in production: we'll be posting them through doors soon. Very pleased with how the pledges have been coming in, the £2 pledge idea continues next week. Aiming to get the message across that a small contribution from many people can make a big difference by attracting funders. In the digital deluge, these punchy flyers were fun to create and should be fun to receive! Also in print are pretty nice invitations to a fundraising event we are holding on August 3rd in Fio Adamson's garden. A party for local businesses, encouraging them to contribute. With opportunities for good publicity in return for helping the project and so also helping the community. Two of our next sculptures are on Moyser Road, which has many businesses on it, and in the following phase there will be one on Mitcham Lane, which has more businesses still, many of whom are part of the Council-led regeneration project, as are we.

The image above is of the exquisitely carved model Christopher Guest has made of the sculpture he will make at Oldfield House. We now have 31 backers for our sculpture trail! This week we are concentrating on getting loads of little pledges of £2 so that we can show just how much the community is behind us. Anyone takin gout one of these will have their name put in for a draw to win a sculpture. Next week we will deliver a flyer all around Furzedown so that we become more and more well known. We already have a couple of primary school girls from my street longing to post them through letter boxes and give them to their school friends. We aim to make it clear that we are looking for match funding from the Mayor, and of course people around here love Sadiq because he's our ex-MP and our neighbour so that could be a bonus. We are planning a garden party for backers and local businesses on August 3rd which should be fun as long as the weather holds out. And if it doesn't we'll find a way to make it a good event anyway. For those of you who use Facebook and Twitter you will have noticed that we have been pretty active and we encourage as many Likes, Shares, and Retweets as possible. We love to see people sharing about our project on all their networks.