Volunteers Meeting 19th January & Kesgrave Market

This weekend proves what a hardy, loyal and good hearted bunch of volunteers we have. What a brilliant turnout to our first volunteers meeting of 2013, despite the weather! Our four new volunteers met our founder volunteers and we had an action packed meeting. First a talk from Garry and Catherine about the Warm Homes, Healthy People Scheme being promoted by the Rural Coffee Caravan Information Project; then twenty minutes of role playing a neighbour’s telephone enquiry, for the benefit of our new volunteers, and finally a round up of news and some discussion on fund raising, gritting and the year ahead.

Carry and Catherine had a table at Kesgrave Market, earlier on in the morning and did a roaring trade giving away mugs, slippers, rubber bottoms for walking sticks, kindling and a host of other things. They also took plenty of bookings for a Warm Homes survey – free advice from trained consultants on how to keep warm at minimum cost. And, even better, they also managed to recruit a new volunteer for the Kesgrave Good Neighbour Scheme!

Warm Homes, Healthy People have a sizeable budget to spend before the end of March to help those who need it most to keep warm this winter. They’re doing Road Shows all over Suffolk and often share venues with a number of other helpful organisations. If you can make it, they’re well worth a visit. Below are some useful links:

Warm Homes, Healthy People 

Rural Coffee Caravan Information Project

BBC Radio Suffolk Promotes Good Neighbours

Many thanks to the lovely Mark Murphy (even lovelier in the flesh!) for inviting us onto his show to talk about the Kesgrave Good Neighbour Scheme, alongside Nat Bocking from Suffolk ACRE who told Mark about Suffolk Good Neighbour Schemes in general.

Here’s Jane, our Chairman waiting for the call and following in the golden footsteps of Len Goodman, the Strictly Come Dancing chief of judges, who spoke passionately on Mark’s show earlier about looking after our neighbours. We all used to do it well but we’re not so good at it now so we hope our scheme will help everyone in Kesgrave to do this a bit better. Well done to Nat, who took Jane’s photo, for angling it so that her head obscured the word in green on the poster behind. Jane wasn’t quite so diligent with Nat’s photo and the whole word is revealed next to his head shot. The poster is about one of BBC Radio Suffolk’s many successful campaigns – “Don’t be a Tosser”!  Guess which is the big word in green?!

If you listened to more of Mark’s show afterwards you will have heard about a really successful volunteer gritting scheme already happening in Stowmarket and Sudbury and that’s our next piece of research. If you listen regularly to BBC Radio Suffolk you’ll find out that there’s a lot more going on in the community than you might have thought!

You can listen again to our chat on Mark’s show by following this link: Kesgrave Good Neighbour Scheme on Mark Murphy Radio Show It starts at 2 hours 28 mins 50 seconds. You can only listen again for seven days from the broadcast but if you’re reading this afterwards, Suffolk Acre have put the audio up on their website. Click on this link http://www.suffolkacre.org.uk/main.php/news/269

Volunteer Meeting 19th January 2013

Warm Homes, Healthy People are coming to talk to us at our volunteer meeting at 12 noon in the Pavilion, Kesgrave Community Centre, opposite the tennis courts. We’ve also got them a table at Kesgrave Market from 9am to 12 the same day so that more Kesgrave residents can find out about what they can offer to keep our homes warm. Anyone interested in finding out more about the Kesgrave Good Neighbour Scheme is very welcome to come along to the first 15 minutes of our meeting. Volunteers can find out what’s in store for 2013, hear some good news about funding and future visitors, and help shape our plans for the year.

Volunteer Meeting Saturday 19th January 2013

We hope to get newsletters round to all volunteers before Christmas and there’s plenty of news to report. However here’s advance warning of an important get together in January. Amongst other things…..

1) we have four new volunteers who are looking forward to meeting our founder volunteers and learning more about helping their neighbours

2) we need the input of all volunteers to plan our first fund raising event

3) we’d like to get some provisional meeting dates in our diaries for the whole of 2013 so we have a plan for the year

4) we have some good news on funding – we’re 25% of the way to funding our operational costs for 2013 thanks to Kesgrave Town Council and The Suffolk Foundation has very kindly awarded us a grant for a specific project which will help us get better known in Kesgrave and reach more neighbours needing help

5) we’ve come across some exciting new organisations that will also help our community and assist us in signposting Kesgrave residents to other sources of help

The meeting starts at 12 noon and, this time, is in The Bowl’s Pavilion, next to the main Community Centre buildings. The entrance is opposite the tennis courts and you can park right next to it on the Grange Farm side of the Community Centre, or just a short walk away on the Bell Lane side of KWMCC. We expect to be finished by 1 30, latest.

Any Kesgrave resident who’d like to consider joining up as a volunteer is welcome to come along for the first fifteen minutes of the meeting. We’ll give you a volunteer card to take away which allows you to choose what sort of help you want to give and roughly when you might be available, we’ll tell you a little more about the scheme and, if you like what you hear, we can explain the very simple next steps.

Remember that it’s also the third Saturday of the month so you can drop into Kesgrave monthly market on your way to the meeting!

November Catch Up

It doesn’t seem like three weeks ago that we had our first social get together for volunteers. It was, and the second one is next Wednesday, 28th November, 7 30pm  at Kesgrave Social Club. We all buy our own drinks but here’s a great local venue where buying a round takes you back to the pub prices of yesteryear! It’s a great opportunity for all the volunteers to catch up with what’s going on and address any teething troubles, as well as getting to know their neighbours better!

The committee will be getting together again on 8th December to go through all the normal aspects of the scheme admin and we are also going to try and set out an outline calendar for 2013 – public meetings, volunteer get togethers, fund raising events, etc. As soon as possible after that we’ll be sending out a newsletter to volunteers and inviting their comments and ideas though, of course, those are welcome any time!

Scheme activity is picking up fast and, from a slow start, the calls are beginning to come in much more frequently which is very satisfying.

Today we had a very productive meeting with a number of volunteers from Kesgrave and District Help Centre (KDHC) to see how we can help each other as well as the Kesgrave community at large. KDHC has coffee mornings every Thursday at the Community Centre and, with a minibus equipped to carry wheelchairs, has been specialising in community transport for a number of years.

And…finally, please note that, with the encouragement of one of our very IT literate volunteers, we have added a widget to this blog which allows you to subscribe to it by email so, when a new posting goes up, you will automatically be sent it if you’ve signed up!

Keeping Up With Our Volunteers!!

Last Wednesday we had our first semi social event for volunteers. Kesgrave Social Club very kindly offered us a partitioned area by the bar - the area at the far end of the photo, partitioned by closing the large gap, to the left of the radiator, with the built in roller partition. That’s not us in the photo though – we were all seated giving intense thought to our future programme of publicising the scheme, with just the occasional refreshment to lubricate the process and encourage a creative flow!

It was a really useful session as we were able to swap notes on various things, remind ourselves of the big list of jobs we agreed to complete to move things forward, and refresh ourselves on some of the protocols, and the minimal but essential bureaucracy, that comes along with a scheme of this sort. Most importantly we were able to get to know each other a lot better which not only fulfils part of the social side but is a great help to phone holders to make a better match between those neighbours needing a bit of help and those volunteers offering to give it. It also reminded us what a diverse, practical, proactive, creative and helpful bunch we were – the enthusiasm to be effective Good Neighbours, and the practical skills backing it up was clearly demonstrated!

Since we launched the scheme with our founding group of nearly 20 volunteers, we have several more coming forward and feel that we should devote a meeting every quarter to new volunteers. This would involve a brief induction process for new volunteers including CRB checks, ID card photos and some training on phone and “visiting” protocols. And of course tea, coffee and home made cakes too!

Many thanks to Kesgrave Social Club for letting us use their facilities – one of the pleasures of getting involved in a community scheme like this is finding out so much more about all the great facilities and organisations already available in Kesgrave. 

Volunteers, please put the next date in your diary - Wednesday 28th November at 7 30pm, Kesgrave Social Club, Edmonton Road – we’re aiming to make this a regular fixture for the fourth Wednesday of every month.

Good Neighbour Schemes Forum

On Friday we were lucky enough to be invited to a Good Neighbour Schemes Forum, by Suffolk ACRE, who helped us set up our scheme and the 29 schemes before us. It started with a “do it yourself lunch” (where we all brought a plate of food), a description that belies the excellent spread and the work that went into it. Some were better DIYers than others and the home made bread sandwiches and locally made pork pies were particular highlights!

Over lunch we got to know the members of some of the other schemes and after lunch we all gave a brief report on the highs and lows of the year, or since the newer schemes started. It was very reassuring to learn that our path, so far, is very like most of the other schemes when they were in their infancy, particularly in the time it takes to establish trust in the scheme and spread the word. We agreed that many people who needed help were, like us, reluctant to ask for it and many of the more established schemes felt it was important to be active in the community and seek out (obviously in a discrete and sensitive way) those that might need a helping hand. We hope that, as our volunteers forge individual links with other local organisations, word will spread and we will connect with more of those that need us. It’s started already and we’ve had a steady flow of calls in the last couple of weeks.

We were also updated, very clearly and concisely,by SAVO. on various important changes impacting on the administration of the scheme, notably changes that the government is making to CRB checks. This need not bother our service users at all, or our volunteers very much (and not just yet) but we will be producing a couple of new pages for the volunteer manual in due course to reflect best practice. We were all very grateful not to have to reinvent the wheel ourselves – fortunately for us, SAVO had condensed a huge unwieldy bit of draft legislation, on which they were consulted, into the essential facts (and the normal legislative grey areas) that were relevant to us.