Thank you to everyone who attended our Zoom meeting on Thursday night. Simon, Heather, Sophie and Anthony, Judy, Karen, Marion and Jonathan had a very productive session.
We agreed to formally form a separate group from XR Wellingborough after talking about the reasons for doing so. We have also agreed to draw up a constitution, which may include having a committee, but must focus on the group being run collectively by all members. Heather will look at constitutions and share something we can use as a basis for our group.
We talked in detail about the One Wellingborough Plus project, agreed to jointly manage One Wellingborough Plus’s Community Resilience Actions, and to accept funding for our new projects. These will include our community allotment, swap shops, a repair club (to work alongside our Repair Cafes) and a volunteer timebank. Jonathan has agreed to draw up an action plan for these activities.
Judy agreed (weather permitting) to join Jonathan, hopefully Anthony Loukes and anyone else who is interested, at our community allotment plot on Sunday at 11am to see what we can do there. We discussed who would be able to use it, how we could use it to share skills, and what we should grow there. Using the plot to grow flowers for local community centres and community gardens, plus produce to feed animals at Animals in Need were very popular ideas…
Heather offered to host Repair Cafes at Glamis Hall separately from their indoor car boot sales. Simon (who is also one of our repairers) missed this conversation but was keen to start the repair Cafes again. I will contact our other repairers to organise this.
We talked about how we can operate the Repair Cafes and the Repair Club, we looked at how to share how the items are fixed and came up with two solutions. One could be to have a socially distanced audience for one or two repairers, the other option could be recording the repair and sharing via YouTube and social media. Simon thought that we/he can do this, and this idea of sharing by video was also suggested for other demonstrations, for example willow weaving, activities at the community allotment and Judy showing us how to make eco cleaning products.
We discussed our social media groups on Facebook and Nextdoor, our blog and other forums, including our Slack channel*, agreeing that these are easy to use and manage. We decided that with the addition of a YouTube channel, what we have is enough for what we need, and that the logo doesn’t need changing.
Simon has agreed to host future Zoom meetings with his subscription so that meetings aren’t interrupted by the 40 minute time limit. We agreed to have monthly meetings with this.
We also discussed our current activities, including our litter pick, and talked about how well they are received by local people. Our next litter pick is on Saturday 31st October 10-12, on the Hemmingwell. I will update the group about this in more detail over the weekend…
* Our Slack channel is at wellingborough.slack.com and anyone can join us to discuss our activities. For an invite please email info@wellingboroughecogroup.org.uk