Celebrating the work we do

I’m fortunate enough to be working with a great bunch of people in a social justice consultancy, Good Faith Partnership, and on their biggest project which is the Warm Welcome campaign.

The campaign encourages community spaces to open up and offer spaces, for free, for people to come together, often to share cups of tea and coffee, sometimes a meal, and often an activity.

The spaces are particularly for people experiencing loneliness or struggling with the cost of living, but the campaign has evolved over the two years that it’s been running and now we have a bold ambition to enable everyone in the UK to reconnect to their communities by visiting a Warm Welcome Space.

On 17 April, we celebrated the impact of the Warm Welcome Campaign at a special Evensong service at St Paul’s Cathedral in London, followed by a reception for volunteers, space guests, partners and supporters.

I can’t tell you what a joy it is to be working on something so positive, which is having a real impact on improving people’s lives. Especially when the news is so full of doom and gloom. At a grassroots level people are pulling together, connecting and making each others’ lives immensely more bearable.

There’s lots of work going on behind the scenes, now that we’re into spring, assessing the impact and adjusting the strategy to support the year-round project. That’s because the majority of the Warm Welcome Spaces have decided to remain open throughout the year, after initially opening in the winter months of 2022 and 2023.

In other news

Nick Robinson in trouble for saying Palestinians had been murdered in Gaza.

Waitrose ran into problems with a wonky billboard to highlight its falling prices – people thought the actual billboard was falling down and asked for protective fencing to installed underneath it. To my mind, it looks like the arrow is pointing to the road name, which is irrelevant and confusing. But, as we know, there’s no such thing as bad publicity and this was all publicity for the upmarket supermarket chain.

On Wednesday this week, Press Gazette ran this interesting piece about why the FT might be wrong to allow ChatGPT to licence its content to train artificial intelligence.

Just a short update from me this month. I’ll be back next month, halfway through the calendar year already.