A quick message from Celia:

Hello all! Welcome to the first Local Welcome Weeknotes of 2024 🤗

For some of you, these will be the first Local Welcome Weeknotes you’ve ever read, as it’s the first time I’ve shared them around more widely than with our leaders at ‘active’ groups alone.

Our Weeknotes are published and sent out to our leaders via Whatsapp on Thursdays. We use them to share what team Local Welcome focused on last week, what we’ll be focusing on the following week, and a ‘photo of the week’ (that’s the best bit!).

As we enter this buffer period as our Weeknotes audience broadens to leaders in both ‘active’ and ‘launching’ groups, I wanted to give a heads up to those of you joining us that you might sometimes not fully understand what I’m talking about - it’s hard to contextualise everything whilst keeping it concise. Therefore, please always feel welcome to email me your questions: [email protected]

Happy reading! 😊

What we’ve been focusing on this week (and last week!)

• Adjusting to our new schedules - we’ve made some changes to our hours as a team, in order to reduce our running costs as an organisation. As with all change, it can take some time to get used to the ‘new normal’ as the shape of our weeks look a little different, and we adjust to our new time capacities. However, I’m pleased to say that all the preparation we did before Christmas, and the strong trust and cohesion we have as a little team has served as well so far, and we’ve been successfully getting new work over the line!
• Celebrating sign ups from the ads we ran over Christmas - we ran social media ads in the locations of all our active groups, as well as some locations where we want to launch Local Welcome groups. We were so pleased with the results and have already been enjoying connecting with some of the the wonderful humans who signed up! Some of our new members even booked on and attended meals last Sunday 😍
• Kicking off our new Leader Welcome Sessions - we ran our first last Thursday, and we’re looking forward to another one tonight! At the session last week, we connected with some eager new leaders in Norwich and Belfast. These leaders are amongst the first to help us test out our new (more autonomous) group launch process, and we can’t wait to learn from their feedback and develop it some more, together.

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

• Preparing to do some more Oral Histories recording and filming in February - since coming back from the holidays, we’ve been busy planning the next steps for our Oral Histories project, funded by The Heritage Lottery. Next week we’ll be holding meetings with Professor John Gabriel (Oral History Society Chair) and Nice and Serious who are both supporting us with this work, to show them these plans. We can’t wait to capture more of the amazing personal stories shared around the tables of our meals!
• Supporting our new groups on their path to launching - next week, ****we’ll be following up with the leaders attending their welcome session tonight and guiding them through the next steps. We’re also going to do some user research calls with some of our other new signups.
• Preparing to introduce our groups to Soldo cards - these are (what we think will be) the key to enabling our groups to choose which recipes they cook, and to purchase their own ingredients locally. We can’t wait to test these out with you, and see what you get cooking! There are more details to follow, but in the meantime, if you’re part of an active group, you can refer back to Ben’s end-of-year email for further context (Email Subject: “🎄 Updates and Happy Christmas!”) 😊

Photo of the week

Last Sunday, our Derby group celebrated Orthodox Christmas Day with baklava after the delicious meal they prepared together!