Supporting the Walthamstow Community
As a community shopping centre, 17 & Central has Community at its heart. We are proud to be part of a vibrant community and endeavour to help and support our local community.
In 2022 we worked with some brilliant people and organisations. Here are a few things that we achieved.
We celebrated our diverse community by Celebrating Eid, Easter, Diwali, Christmas, pride month as well as recognising the different languages spoken in the borough in our graphics.
We promoted inclusivity by taking the purple 356 training to improve the experience of our diverse guests, celebrating events like Dementia action week and Pride month, and promoting our mental health champion.
We promoted local artists and authors and celebrated art and culture during the Queen’s Jubilee weekend with talented performers and artists. Our Jubilee flag painted by the members of the staff and the community has a place of pride in our centre court area.
We raised £11955 for various charities including over £4000 for our Charity of the Year PL84U Al Suffa, a Walthamstow-based charity, supporting families and local people with a wide range of community-focused services including a food bank, clothing bank, baby bank, furniture, household goods, hot meals, companionship, and recreational facilities. Since announcing our association last year, we have undertaken a series of events to raise awareness and vital funds for the charity as well as a crowd funding page. In December, last year we offered the charity a void unit in the shopping centre so that it could raise additional funds by selling donated items. to raise funds for much-needed essentials for vulnerable individuals and families in Waltham Forest. It has also been supporting the charity’s central food bank through staff volunteering and encouraging guest donations at the mini food bank, which was installed outside Asda. We’re planning on installing a larger donations cupboard so that we can carry on giving food and much-needed essentials to the charity and we’ll continue to raise awareness of its activities through our social channels.
We worked with various community groups to help raise awareness and connect with the community in the centre.
We worked on Sustainability by.
- Spreading awareness about green sustainability initiatives and encouraging our guest to use reusable cups, refill stations and dedicated recycle bins.
- Recycling 107 tonnes of waste.
- Generating 92,768 kwh of solar power.
- Placing trees in the centre, improving air quality.
- Offsetting the CO2 emissions of our website.
- Replacing our car park lights with energy efficient LED’s
- Using reusable Christmas decoration
- Promoting recycling initiatives by our amazing retail partners.
- Hosting a pop-up Swap shop to encourage our guest to repair, reuse and recycle.
- Hosted Sustainability themed summer activity for children and families – The Sustainable Summer Camp.
Thank you to all our retail partners, colleagues, charity partners, community groups and the wonderful Walthamstow community.
