(Some of) What we did this week…
- Worked on the final preparations for your October meals 🍲
- Spent a rare day in-person as a team, including one of our trustees - Nick - who joined us for lunch! One of the highlights of the day was a workshop during which we explored how we can improve the way we equip leaders to launch new groups 🚀
- Did some strategic planning to renew our focus for the last 3 months of 2025 👩💻
Following up our Reflective Practice Session
We had a wonderful, insightful time with those of you who could make it to our quarterly Reflective Practice Session last month!
A key topic was that of handling difficult conversations - both during and in-between meals.
One example was listening to personal stories from members who are people seeking sanctuary, and having a difficult time navigating the asylum system, and realising that you don’t know or understand much about this yourself, and wishing you knew more. This included wanting to be able to signpost people to resources/services, if you felt confident doing so.
Another example was hearing negative misconceptions and/or misinformation about people seeking sanctuary and refugees from people you interact with outside of meals, and wishing you were better equipped with facts and statistics to accompany your stories from attending Local Welcome meals, in order to challenge their views.
We plan to publish toolkits to support with both of these areas in future, but for now, we wanted to at least share a couple of resources:
- Right to Remain’s Toolkit - A free online guide to the UK immigration and asylum system: https://righttoremain.org.uk/toolkit/
- Larger Us’s blogpost on “How to talk about the riots” which contains useful advice on handling conversations with people who have negative views on people seeking sanctuary and refugees, and helping them question these: https://larger.us/ideas/how-to-talk-about-the-riots/
(Some of) What we’re doing next week…
- Debriefing your October meals, and starting to promote your confirmed November meals 🥙
- Sharing and developing our new group launch strategy with people who are interested in launching a Local Welcome group in their community 💜
- Working on our next round of 10th year plans 🎂
Photo of the week
A throwback to Derby’s October meal last year 💜
