The 2nd Stoke Gifford Rainbows have been busy recruiting volunteers to help renovate a disused telephone box with the aim of transforming it into a community toy library.
The group of 5 to 7-year-old girls first put out an appeal at the beginning of the year, looking for carpenters, glaziers and cast iron welders to give up some of their time to help transform the phone box. Now, after meeting with some local residents, work has already begun on the telephone box which is located at The Green, North Road. Richard and Bryan, members of the local community, have removed the door and it has been taken away to be repaired. They also removed the backboard located inside the telephone box and cleared away all of the weeds so it is already looking much neater and cleaner. The Rainbows have also had a mystery resident replace the missing panes of glass and the group have been trying to track down who is responsible, posting on their Facebook page: “Are you the anonymous glazing fairy who repaired our broken panes of glass?? Thank you!!!”
Alongside recruiting volunteers, the 2nd Stoke Gifford Rainbows have also been busy registering themselves for the Airbus Community Awards which means they are now in with a chance of winning a share of the £10,000 prize money. Tokens were available to collect between Friday 16th February and Monday 19th March and the top ten community groups to collect the most tokens will receive a share of the prize money. The girls, their friends and families all spent countless hours collecting and cutting out tokens but it was all worth it as they collected an incredible total of 96,691 tokens. Alix, leader in charge of the 2nd Stoke Gifford Rainbows, expressed her thanks:
“Thank you all so much for your support over the last few weeks. Daffodil has been a force of nature in getting us over 90,000 tokens – with lots of support from work mates, friends and family – it’s been a huge effort and hopefully it will bear fruit. Thank you Daffodil!”
Last week, the winners of the awards were announced at a special ceremony which took place at Airbus in Filton. The 2nd Stoke Gifford Rainbows came in second, receiving £2,000 of the prize money.
The next stage of the project is to strip the old paint and repaint the telephone box in the bright red that everyone recognises. The hope is that this will be done in the coming months as the weather improves. The Rainbows will then start thinking about how to decorate the telephone box, most likely using window stickers to publicise Girlguiding.
If anyone has any ideas for the project or would like to help out in anyway, please contact the team at 2ndstokegiffordrainbows@gmail.com
Photo: The telephone box as it currently stands, with the door having been removed for repairs.
