Parish Path Adopter Recruitment
The unique circumstances we are currently experiencing do provide us with the opportunity of progressing the recruitment of Parish Path Adopters which I have encouraged in my last two communications.
The behaviour guidance from the NHS states that:
We can go out for one form of exercise a day, for example a run, walk, or cycle – alone or with members of your household, importantly remaining at least 2 metres from other people to reduce the likelihood of infection.
My purpose in writing is to encourage you, as Ramblers Leaders, to immediately set in motion the recruitment of our members by linking them to the Parishes where they live and to incorporate the job of inspecting paths with their daily exercise routine.
I will send you, by a separate email, a map of your Group’s catchment area which will show you the Parishes for which the Group is responsible. I would be grateful if you, or someone you nominate, would match people to Parishes depending on where they live.
Once you have this information you will be in the position to ask them to volunteer to take their exercise along the paths in the Parish. Please explain that we want the Adopters to identify any faults which they encounter, to describe them and give some idea as to their position. You can appoint more than one person to a Parish if there are a large number of paths. For the smaller parishes, one volunteer might choose to adopt two or more Parishes.
Please let Ian Glen ian.a.glen@gmail.com know of the main contact for the scheme who should inform him of appointments, please ask her/him to wait until they have a few before sending them off (to save email traffic).
All this may seem very crude at the moment but, over the next few weeks we hope to improve the procedures. We will, for instance, provide you with coloured paper maps for each of your Parishes which show all the paths along with their numbers. We will also refine the reporting procedure so that we can get uniformity across the County. Once we have the names and contact details for the volunteers we will be able to provide them with help in their valuable work.
I believe that, with your help, we have the opportunity here to provide purposeful exercise which will eventually lead to a vast improvement in the path network throughout the County.
Len Banister
Essex Area Ramblers
Rights of Way Liaison