(Some of) What we did this week…
- Prepared for a full weekend of 7 Local Welcome meals! 🍛
- Continued working towards the release of our recipe e-book (see more below) 📖
- Submitted more funding applications and published a blog post about the challenging funding environment (read it below) 💰
📖 Reminder: Choose a recipe this weekend to represent your group in our e-book
Our vision is for our e-book to consist of recipes which represent each of our groups, and some of the humans and stories behind them! Therefore, we’d like to invite you to work with your members to put forward a recipe to represent your group. A few details on this:
- Please discuss which recipe to choose with your group at your November meals, and let us know your chosen recipe on Monday 3rd November.
- We want to ensure each recipe featured in the e-book is ‘tried and tested’, so it must be a submitted recipe which already exists in our recipe catalogue.
- Please provide a few lines on why you’ve chosen the recipe, what it means to your group, and any memories associated with it (e.g. was there a special moment at a meal when it was prepared?). If included, we will change any names in order to protect the identity of individuals.
- We expect there could be some duplicate submissions between you, so it’s worth picking some backup recipes with your group just in case!
🙇 The grant funding environment is really tough right now...
One of our values is to 'tell the truth'...and to be honest, despite all the energy, love and passion everyone brings to Local Welcome meals (and, speaking on behalf of our team, LEAG, and trustees...our desks!) securing grants to keep your groups cooking, eating and taking action together has been really tough.
We understand this level of radical transparency might leave your head spinning, with questions of how you can help Local Welcome fare this storm. With more and more news surrounding us of well-established, well-loved small charities who've been doing incredible work having to close down due to lack of funding, we felt it important to be truthful now - rather than retrospectively, when its all too late.
Our fundraiser, Rhiannon, has written a blog post to shed more light on the challenges we've been facing, with some practical information on how you can help. We’re also sharing this with your members via our monthly email newsletter tonight: https://www.localwelcome.org/blog/28-10-25-a-challenging-time-for-small-charities-like-local-welcome
(Some of) What we’re doing next week…
- Debriefing your November meals and setting up your confirmed December meals 🥙
- Keeping momentum towards the launch of our new groups 🚀
- Putting your chosen recipes into the e-book and polishing the page designs 📖
Photo of the week
A throwback photo from Birmingham’s meal in November last year 🍂