On Thursday 3rd July, Open Doors Somerset held it’s monthly meeting. This was also the AGM for the organisation, and the current Chair – Michael Fox – gave a round up of his thoughts from the past twelve months. There has been a lot of change for the organisation as it continues to grow and evolve, and it’s always a great way to take a moment and see how far we have come.
For anyone wishing to come along to a monthly meeting, these are held on the first Thursday of the month in Bar5, at 5.30pm – 6.30pm. Full details can be found on our Activities page.
A year ago we were Crowdfunding to get a valuation done of the NatWest, in an effort to persuade the owner to sell to us. In the event the valuation was far below what he thought the building was worth and we have been unable to move forward with him. We are looking into finding other buildings and still hoping the stars align to get the NatWest – an iconic building dominating our high street – back into meaningful public use.
In the last year we have:
- Continued distributing surplus food to people who’d like to use it at the George Reynolds Centre – we have saved 15.6 tonnes from going to landfill in the last 12 months – Kirsteen has more details on our fridge operation later.
- We continued supporting the Chop & Chat community cooking group, which meets every Friday at the Speedwell Hall – in November it celebrates its fourth birthday.
- Launched a weekly Chat Café with the support of the Open Mental Health Network, and now Lindsey has recently agreed to co-ordinate its activities and become a director.
We successfully applied for grant funding that enabled us to:
- Run a Christmas fun food activity in a joint project with Awe & Wonder which does fortnightly art projects for under 5’s and their carers.
- Run a weekly Winter Warmer session for three months, where a cook prepared a soup or stew using surplus food where possible, along with a cheese toastie.
- Recruit a part-time fundraiser – very lucky to have Jess Wright working with us, who founded the Zion community centre in Bristol so is familiar with the journey we’re on.
- Recruit a project co-ordinator – Charlie Wild is a former recycling officer for the City of London, and has brought renewed vigour to our activities – updating our website and marketing activities with the help of Erin, our marketing volunteer.
- And start to pay Kirsteen, our pantry co-ordinator, for some of the hours she devotes to running the food distribution. She’s been doing this for nearly all of the five years we’ve been running – THANKYOU!!! Kirsteen has also been working hard to set up a Repair Hub, and we’re delighted to say it’s being launched on September 27th during Recycling Week.
- We’ve changed our trading name to Open Doors Somerset, although Crewkerne Community Kitchen is our registered Community Interest Company name.
- We’ve also become part of a group of four local organisations – with Ark at Egwood, Chard Watch Project and the Chard Community Hub. We all plan to work more closely together and to share our experience and best practises so more people can benefit from our work.
We are still looking for a building we can turn into a community centre. We’ve produced a business plan which we shared with a prospective landlord who gave us positive feedback although they did choose a different tenant. All the activity is helping professionalise our activities and to put us in a good position to set up a community hub when the opportunity arises. Our links to sister organisations in the area will make it easier to share resources, ideas, and to bring new activities into the town.
September will also see us launching a Table Tennis wellbeing session supported by the mental health charity Sport In Mind, which is funding all, or at least the vast majority of the costs.
In October, Karen Rawlinson has agreed to start work as our new treasurer which is great news. Many thanks to Richard Hawkins for his help and support as treasurer for the past four years, and for his invaluable support for us more generally – he and his wife Jan were among the first people to help us by picking up food from supermarkets.
We continue to make the organisation more resilient so we are in a good position to take on a space in the town and turn it into a vibrant inclusive community centre, which is now our main mission.
