Last Saturday we hosted our Mid-year conference and 40 wonderful Hub Leaders from across the country came along. The first of our two conferences in 2016, the mid-year is a chance for us to all share and discuss developments at FoodCycle HQ and within our Hubs, for our Hub Leaders to receive training, and for us all to get together and celebrate the amazing work going on up and down the country!
With 6am trains from cities as far away as Exeter and Durham, we had 21 different Hubs represented, all sharing their experience, knowledge and passion.
The day kicked off with a workshop looking at our Hub outputs and how we measure what impact our Hubs are having in their local communities. This lead to fascinating discussions about how we can best support what is going on on the ground.
The next workshop was delivered by the amazing Fran from The Food Chain. She spoke about Mental Health Awareness – looking at how our volunteers can have a better understanding and appreciation of what might be going on in some of our guest’s lives. As one Hub Leader said afterwards, “it was so valuable to find out and understand more about mental health.”
From here we went into a great session run by the dynamic duo Dan and Martin from Feedback. They talked about food waste in Britain and around the world, the scale of the problem and how they are tackling it with a number of initiatives. Two of which are Disco Soups and their Gleaning programme. They also introduced our new partnership project ‘From Farm to Fork’ and we discussed what ways our volunteers can get involved. For more info on this please click here. It was a thoroughly insightful presentation – and left us all with brilliant ideas about how to integrate FoodCycle and Feedback’s work even further.
We then had a hub skill-sharing session – with 21 different Hubs all discussing with each other their different strengths and challenges.
After a Q&A session, the day rounded off with a trip to The Three Johns for a pint or two…
Thanks so much to everyone who came – as ever you are all completely inspirational!
The FoodCycle Team xxx
