November 26, 2020

What’s next for Local Welcome

It’s time for us to share with you what’s next for Local Welcome.

It’s been a tough year. After working so hard to launch our meals in cities across the UK we had to put all our brilliant groups on pause in March as the pandemic hit. 

The truth is we still don’t know when it will be safe for us to run meals again. 

Our team has been going through a period of adjustment. We’ve all had to get used to the idea that restarting meals could still be a long way off and we don’t mind telling you this has been hard for us to process and accept. 

When you spend all your working hours ploughing all your efforts into something, especially something as wonderful as our meals, having it taken away feels like a real loss and it’s something we’ve been slowly coming to terms with as a team and as individuals. 

We miss our leaders, we miss our members and we miss our refugee guests. Every Monday we used to meet as a team to go through the feedback from leaders who led meals the previous day and we miss the stories they used to share with us; the shy boy who loved sounding the dinner gong, the mums who spoke different languages but arranged a playdate for their kids; the reluctant husband who came along with his wife and ended up as king of the rosti table. 

Stories like this inspired us, made us cry and put fire in our bellies.

Feeling less connected to our community has had a huge impact on us, perhaps a greater impact that we might have realised, because, quite frankly, we miss the joy that comes from running an organisation that’s helping to make good things happen in the world.

Coming to terms with this kind of loss is so, so hard, but....

We are still a team with a mission.

We are still a team with a vision.

We’re still a team with a goal.

Nothing has changed even though everything has changed

Our vision is still diverse, resilient, and powerful communities, acting together for their common good. 

Our mission is still to design global digital infrastructure and shared rituals for community leaders.

Our goal is still to run an impactful, inclusive ritual that is membership funded.

What’s changed is the environment we’re operating in - it’s less safe and we have more constraints on what we’re able to do.

So what now?

Local Welcome has always been about connecting people. We bring people together. We enable them to share their stories. We help them to feel less isolated or lonely. 

Over the past five years we’ve learned an awful lot about how to do this stuff and the knowledge we have about how to help people feel connected, at a time when we’re all isolated from each other, feels very relevant. 

We’ve given ourselves time to think and respond to Covid-19

We’re not a charity people depend on for food or shelter so we’ve had time to think about our response to the pandemic without having to address people’s immediate needs.

Also, we received funding from the National Lottery Community Fund in March just ahead of the first lockdown so we’ve been financially secure too. We know many charities have not been in this position.

My colleague, Will, has written a brilliant piece about how we used the time we had and I don’t want to duplicate his work here, so I’ll say that we’ve been on a journey as a team and I’m pleased we’re now in a position to share with you what’s next. 

We’re going to bring people together but there will be no food

While we’re still committed to bringing our meals back online in the future, we’ve had to let go of the idea of food being the thing that brings people together for now. The way our groups prepare and share meals together - in pairs and in close proximity to one another - means that they’re just not safe in a Covid world. 

We’d have to restructure our meals entirely to make them safe and we think this would reduce the positive social outcomes people experience while taking part. Under Covid restrictions we can’t afford to rely on activities that require people to meet indoors where they have access to kitchens and toilets, so they need to take place outside or remotely.

We’re going to connect people in the place where they live

Our meals helped us to learn a lot about how people feel about the place where they lived. In our survey of leaders and members last year, 29% of people told us that one of their reasons for attending meals was to make connections with others. 

We’ve always been clear that local people who come along to our meals benefit just as much from them as our refugee guests and we want to continue to support these people.

We know that anyone who was already feeling disconnected from their community is likely to be having an especially hard time during lockdown and we want to reach out to them. 

This is why we’ve launched Local Together - socially distanced walks in parks where everyone taking part lives within walking distance of each other. A group of about 15 people meet in a park, they split into groups of 3 and then follow a leader on a walk during which they’re given questions to ask of each other. 

Early enthusiasm has been high - we’ve already had more than 300 sign ups across our first three groups and we’ll be running our first walks once lockdown is over. 

Local Together is going to help us learn how to bring people together in a way that’s Covid safe and has positive social outcomes for people taking part.

Connecting people in the place where they live at a time when so many are living without their usual family and friend support networks feels important.

We’re going to connect people who have a shared lived experience

We’re also taking this opportunity to learn about how to help people to connect remotely. Meeting online has been a lifeline for many people this year (even if some of us have Zoom quiz fatigue) and we’re curious to see if we can design a ritual that happens online and still has positive social outcomes for those involved.

We’ve decided to focus these groups on people who have a shared lived experience, and this is why we’ve launched ADHD Together.

Our CEO, Ben, has ADHD (attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder)  and so the work we’re doing with this community is rooted in his lived experience. We know that living with ADHD can have a serious impact on many areas of a person’s life and that there is precious little support for adults living with ADHD. 

If you have ADHD, your brain is not wired up like most other people’s brains. This can make things other people take for granted - memory, focus, organisation - extremely challenging. You can read more about symptoms on the NHS website.

We want ADHD Together to be a safe space for people with ADHD brains to feel heard, nurtured and celebrated. If we can do this, there’s potential for us to learn about how to support people who have other shared lived experiences.

We’re already seeing signs of high demand - more than 200 people have signed up and 100% of tickets were snapped up for our first 6 events.

We’re not working specifically with refugees for the moment

You’ll have noticed that these two new ideas don’t explicitly include refugees. Let’s be clear - we’re definitely not putting events that include refugees on pause forever, but for the moment, we’re not going to run activities that include them specifically.

One big reason is that we rely heavily on our brilliant partners in the refugee support charities to refer people to our meals. At the moment we know these partners are hugely overstretched as they try to support people through the pandemic and we don’t want to add further to their workload. 

Another reason is that without food, we’re not confident we can offer people a positive experience, yet. 

Food is such an amazing way for people to connect in a low pressure, fun way where it doesn’t matter about the level of English spoken by people sitting around the table. Take the food away, and things can feel quite awkward and stressful pretty quickly.

We don’t think it’s fair to refugees or the people who want to support them to participate in activities that might not go well, lead to negative experiences and leave people feeling frustrated or anxious at a time when we’re also dealing with the stresses of the pandemic. 

As we develop Local Together and remote groups like ADHD Together we will learn more about designing rituals in these contexts. Once we’re confident that these new rituals are strong enough to help people from different backgrounds to connect in meaningful ways, we will find ways to include refugees and other vulnerable groups in them.

We’re launching in London

Our new groups for Local Together and ADHD Together are all in London. This isn’t ideal - we’re a national charity after all - but it’s necessary for now.

This is because launching new ideas means that members of our team have to act as leaders initially and show up in person, and most of our people live in London.

The safety of our team is really important to us and we don’t want to expose them to greater risk by asking them to travel on public transport, so we’re launching in areas we can walk or cycle to.

Once we’ve worked out how to run these new ideas, we hope to be able to learn enough to know how to launch them in places outside of London without us being there (as we did with Local Welcome meals).

Now we’ve told you, we can’t wait to get started

Honestly, being able to communicate all this feels like something of a relief. 

Getting to this level of clarity about what we’ll be doing in the next few months has not been easy. But making the difficult decisions we’ve outlined in this blog means we’re now in a good position to move forwards, positively and with hope. 

Hope that we can learn even more about bringing people together, hope that we’ll continue to have a positive impact on people’s lives, and hope that these new ideas will strengthen us for the future.