When I wrote my review of the week on Sunday, I forgot something that I'd meant to say.
I regularly forget that making Community is something that I probably work on every day. If I'm not actively doing it, I'm thinking about it. I'm writing about it or writing something that will help people connect with each other.
I have a part-time day job now. I'm Community Worker at a church just up the road from where I live. It's lovely work and it can be challenging to do for someone who's recent experience in community building has been mostly with people who want to be online and want to organise online - the congregation I work with are open-minded and enthusiastic about digital things but they just don't have much experience and often default to the ways that they've always organised things. This isn't always wrong but it can carry a bigger overhead, which might not be achievable or sustainable in a two-and-a-half-day week. There's a big need to attract new volunteers and for me to delegate much more.
I managed to write a weeknote for the church website last Friday. That's a discipline I'd like to maintain, even if it finds a different home.
I've rejigged my week to be Monday morning, Wednesday all day and Friday all day. That gives me days like today to do other things. Wednesday's main thing is Sunflower Café, our dementia-friendly coffee morning and Fridays revolve around the community lunch. I'm hoping that doing that every Friday will serve as a focus for attracting those new volunteers and collaborators.
This week I'm also going to be working on making the website a bit more useful, how we bring back our dementia-friendly singing group and working up the idea of a community theatre group - aiming to do a panto at Christmas.
On Friday mornings I also have been running Tuttle (my long-running networking event for people who don't like going to networking events) on Zoom since March last year. It's been fun and we've settled to a regular core who enjoy seeing each other.
And I'm aware that blogging again regularly (in my personal capacity) is also helping to recreate and revitalise some connections that had faded away somewhat.