Celebrating the Warm Welcome Campaign

Last month, I was part of the team that delivered the first ever Warm Welcome Awards, generously hosted by Sky at their Sky Central campus in Osterley, west London.

The Awards were created to celebrate and recognise the thousands of people who open community spaces for people who are lonely, struggling with the cost of living or in crisis. The people running these spaces don’t ordinarily get recognised and it was a wonderful day – compered by Gaby Roslin, who is a huge supporter of the Warm Welcome Campaign. The award winners and shortlisted spaces thoroughly enjoyed our first awards ceremony.

The Rt Hon Gordon Brown, Warm Welcome’s Founding Patron, announced the winner of the award in his name for the ‘Chain of Hope’, the metaphor he came up with to describe the network of almost 6,400 Warm Welcome Spaces that stretches right across Britain.

The day before, we had hosted a group of Warm Welcome Spaces that we call ‘Champions’, a number of spaces that are really engaged with the Campaign, again celebrating the people who make these spaces and the difference they make to people’s lives every day. They provide places of connection and belonging. We were at a Warm Welcome Space called Nourish Hub in Hackney, London. Nourish Hub rescues good food that’s otherwise destined for landfill, and makes delicious food where communities come together, eat well and learn essential skills for life.

Working on comms and PR for the Warm Welcome Campaign is so rewarding – it really is a network of community spaces like no other. And in the teeth of the heatwave at the end of June, we were able to share advice for spaces to also become Cool Spaces, offering shelter and solace when homes are too hot to bear.

We’re in the process of publishing our impact report for the Warm Welcome Campaign for 2025-26, showing that 3.5m visited a Warm Welcome Space in the past year. Encouragingly, our polling shows that 72% of people now live within 30 minutes of a Warm Space, up from 68% the previous year.

My other focus this summer is helping to launch a new website for the Good Faith Partnership, which has developed the Warm Welcome Campaign among many other projects. Watch this space for details.

I hope you survived the heatwave intact and that you’re having a good start to the summer. I saw in the Solstice in the river at midnight with friends, setting the tone for weeks of deliciously cooling dips over the coming months.

See you in August!