National Neighbourhood Watch Week 17th – 25th June 2017

National Neighbourhood Watch Week is our time to celebrate as the largest voluntary movement in England and Wales.

Traditionally NNWW has been a week of member activity – timed to coincide with the year’s longest day, the summer solstice on June 21 – to celebrate and raise awareness of our movement.

The theme of NNWW17 is Connecting and Protecting Communities – with a focus on online fraud and raising awareness of scams.

Our three key aims this year are:

Promote the reach of Neighbourhood Watch – we will use our network and the media to raise awareness that millions of households now identify as members of Neighbourhood Watch and highlight how our principal funder the Home Office and our sponsors, the Co-op Insurance & ERA are working with us to support Neighbourhood Watch to protect and connect all communities.

Encourage scheme registration – during NNWW17 we will promote the benefits of registering on our website as either a new or existing supporter to receive important information from us and connect with their local Neighbourhood Watch coordinator, their police force and other agencies to help protect them from on and offline fraud and other crimes.

Encourage collective action – we’re working with the National Trading Standards (NTS) Scams Team to encourage as many of our supporters as we can to become a Friend Against Scams or a SCAMchampion.

We believe that a lot of people doing a small thing at the same time can have a big impact!

Scams affect the lives of millions of people across the UK. People who are scammed often experience loneliness, shame and social isolation.

Scammers also target elderly and vulnerable people disproportionately and we want to use the power of our movement do what we can to help.

We’re encouraging as many of our members as we can to become a Friend Against Scams by taking 15 minutes of their time to complete an on-line awareness session during NNWW.

Friends Against Scams has been created to tackle the lack of scams awareness by providing information about scams and those who fall victim to them. This enables communities and organisations to understand scams, talk about scams and cascade messages throughout communities about scams prevention and protection.

We will send out the link for the training at the start of NNWW17 to our entire network so we can count how we’ve done.

And there’s more!

We also hope that at least one person from each of our Police Force Areas/London boroughs takes a further step to become a SCAMchampion.

SCAMchampions are Friends Against Scams who want to do more.

SCAMchampions complete an additional training session to give them a fuller understanding of the laws surrounding scams and some presentation tips and host awareness sessions to recruit Friends Against Scams.

As a charity we will also be recognised as a Friends Against Scams Organisation as all NHWN staff and Trustees have taken the on-line awareness training and are now proud, Friends Against Scams.

Everyone who completes the Friends Against Scams training gets a certificate.

Please do help us get behind this important project to protect people from the menace of scams.

Together we can make a real difference.