Apologies for the lack of weeknotes last week! I’m pleased to be able to bring you up to speed again after a busy couple of weeks, here we go…
Continuing to work towards first meals in Norwich, Belfast and Birmingham in March 🍲
Meeting with Jacob - a talented independent evaluator we’re working with to improve our monitoring, evaluation and learning processes as an organisation. (Also, big shout out to Jacob who I believe reads these sometimes…for the record I would have written ‘talented’ regardless 😁 👋)
Polishing off the first version of our handbook and releasing it to you, our amazing (and patient!) leaders 💜🚀
This has been the product of months of hard work from many of you (during design forums) and our team, and we can’t wait to see what you think!
To start with, we’re sharing a read-only version of the handbook which we’ll send you via a link in your Leader Whatsapp group chat.
Please take some time to read and review the handbook as soon as you can. It holds important contextual information which we hope will help finish setting the scene, and clarify the changes we’ve mentioned we’ve been making to our organisation’s operational and financial model.
Please also send us as much feedback as possible via whatsapp, or by emailing us at [email protected]. The handbook is very much a ‘living’ document, and it’s in no way ‘done and dusted’.
Once we’ve shared a version tailored to your own group, we will continue to update it with new sections/toolkits.
I live in Derby, and got to attend our Derby group’s meal the other weekend!
Being back in the space for the first time in quite a while felt really nostalgic, and I remembered the first meals ran in the same venue back in 2019.
It was a reminder of how important venues are to our group, and how magical it can feel when we find the perfect ‘home’ for our meals.
Criteria for a good venue is amongst the many learnings we’ve packaged up and shared in the handbook, so I hope our future groups will feel just as at home in their venues too!
Here’s a little throwback photo of our Derby group that I took in 2019 😊
Thank you for reading 💜
Celia + The Local Welcome Team