A group of residents have come together to try and tackle the litter and flytipping problem on the woodpecker estate. We looked into the issue and discovered that one of the many reasons that the problem is so big is because of a lack of ownership in the estate, this affects many of the problems that we face such as poor maintenance, vandalism and poor community spirit. We have held a number of community events on the estate, to try and engage with other community members to understand the problem and work towards a solution. We used a Co-Design framework to guide us towards a fully defined design specification which we then had this realised by a designer from the community who also designed the framework that we used. We hope that the project will decrease the amount of litter on the streets, we hope that the notice boards will help improve the communication on the estate, we hope the planters will make the estate more beautiful and let people feel at home.

What we'll deliver:

• Bin lids to cover the bins on the estate to stop the: wind, foxes, and birds pulling the rubbish onto the streets.
• Community run notice boards, to help us communicate with people who can't or don't want to attend meetings
• Planters to improve the environment in the estate and give a greater scene of ownership

Why it's a great idea:

We have sent so many emails trying to get the housing association and the council to deal with the flytipping problem, often we don't hear back and sometimes they clean the estate, but the problem fundamentally continues, this is partially due to lack of local government funding and a host of other reasons, including ownership. We can't tackle the big reasons, we can't go out every week with a van, but what we can do is help build a sense of community in the area, which is focused on solving problems that we all face. We want to develop a community that represents everyone in the estate, we want to do this by making changes not just talking about them.

Steps to get it done:

• Build 5 planters
• Buy the soil
• Buy the plants
• refurbish the entrance signs
• build 10 bin lids
• build 3 notice boards
• Assemble the designs at a summer party in the estate

We have sought the necessary permissions from the council and we are good to go, we will be making our designs on a CNC machine, the reason for this is that we want to make all our designs open source, and the CNC is perfect for that, because once you have the files, all you need is to find access to a CNC machine, they sometimes have them in Maker spaces, and sometimes you can access them when they are not being used by a business.