Weeknote 03
Ah, week 3. The week that two thirds of us ditch our New Years Resolutions. It’s cold and wet, the Christmas trees languishing on the streets look miserable, and everyone’s well and truly back at work. I hate January!
What I’ve done this week
I’ve had a week of coaching the team, redesigning our volunteer induction sessions, talking to prospective applicants for the 4 roles we’re currently advertising, and working on our fundraising plan. I also had a fascinating afternoon with our Southwark Director Blanche at her former workplace, Fareshare. I saw what 83 pallets of Rich Tea biscuits looks like. What Fareshare does is amazing, but it made my head spin to think about the crazy quantity of food that is wasted by every week by food manufacturers and supermarkets, despite the increasingly complex algorithms that govern their stock management.
What I’m learning
I’m learning about stuff I know literally nothing about. Namely phishing (grim, but thankfully we narrowly avoided getting stung), and the law around commercial leases and small charities. I feel more naive than I have in a while. I’m hesitating in how I even frame the questions, let alone how I assess the answers or find someone who can help as we hunt out new spaces. It still drives me mad that it’s so HARD to find places where communities can build themselves. Local authorities and businesses can have all the strategies in the world, but if they don’t provide actual rooms for people to meet and do things together, those lofty ambitions will be no more than words on a page.
What I’m celebrating
This week I’ve asked lots of people on the team what their dream is for Little Village. We all recognise the vital importance of the part of our mission that’s about alleviating material poverty through the reuse and redistribution of baby kit. But our growth will come from the core purpose— to make it as easy as possible for families to help one another — and building environments where everyone’s needs of belonging, of being valued and of being connected are met. I want everyone who is part of Little Village to grow and thrive. I feel so excited to have a team who share my motivation to evolve in this way.
What I’m feeling
My main emotion this week has been terror. To put it bluntly, I’m absolutely shitting myself. We have 10+ people on the payroll now, and I’ve got a lot of fundraising to do this year to keep that up. We want new spaces but they do not come cheap. How are we going to afford all this? How am I going to convince people to give us significant, multi-year funding that means we can pay people decent wages and afford London rents? It feels like we’ve moved beyond start-up mode and I’m in this lesser-known space of scaling up which feels much less warm and fuzzy and needs a different kind of energy. Have I got what it takes???
Who I’m working with
It’s been a delightfully team-focused week this week. With one honourable exception: the lovely Ruth, an extraordinary teacher and coach who kindly offered her time for free to help us design a new volunteer induction programme. We don’t teach our volunteers about the mechanics of our work — they learn those things on the job. But we do spend a lot of time helping them to reflect on their own prejudices and how they can handle them. We also teach them that they aren’t here to fix or save people (that one takes a while to get across…). And we encourage people to connect wholeheartedly to our values (love, solidarity, thriving and sustainability). Having Ruth on board to help us put all this into a training session has been completely brilliant. I feel very lucky.
Photo of the week
