What we’ve been focusing on this week…

• Supporting new groups - highlights this week have included running an energising initial meeting with our leaders in Birmingham, and supporting with the venue-finding process in Norwich (we now have one booked!). We’re so excited to get cooking and eating in Norwich and Birmingham in March!
• Online communities for groups - recently, Azad has been leading on exploring ways of bringing our groups together online. Therefore, when our Birmingham leaders asked us if they could connect with people who’ve signed up as interested members (before their group launches) we thought it would be the perfect opportunity to test using Facebook groups! Let us know if you’d like to test this out with your group by sending us a Whatsapp 😊
• Planning non-grant income tests - we’re currently reliant on grant-funding and a small portion of income generated by monthly membership donations from leaders, and meal ticket purchases from members. As we’ve shared recently, we’re introducing a new pay-what-you-can membership model which we hope will make our meals more accessible, and bring us closer to being self-funded. However, we’d also like to test how we might generate income to support the work we do as a charity through other methods. This week, we ran a team workshop and decided on the first four tests we’re going to run with between now and March. We’ll share more on this in the coming weeks!

(Some of) what we’re focusing on next week…

• Running an initial meeting with our Belfast leaders - we can’t wait to meet you all, draw up a plan, and get a date for your first meal in our diaries!
• Making sure we stay on track, as we approach our Heritage Lottery Oral Histories filming and recording day in Derby on Sun 4 Feb. It’s been a lot of hard work, but everything has been falling into place (I hope I’ve not just jinxed it 🤞)
• Running our first pre-paid Soldo Card tests - Sun 4 Feb will also be the first weekend where leaders have selected the recipes their group is cooking, and then purchased the ingredients themselves, using the pre-paid cards we’ve issued them. We can’t wait to see the delicious dishes you choose 😍

Photo of the week

I’m short on recent photos, so had a look back at some ‘old’ ones. I think this was taken in 2017-18 and I chose it because one of our returning leaders in Birmingham (who led our group there before the pandemic) mentioned that they’d always end up on the potato rostis tables 😂

For those of you who have joined us more recently, this was a bit of a Marmite recipe to make (you’d either love it, or hate it) with lots of mess, but an overall tasty result!

Thank you for reading 💜

Celia + The Local Welcome Team