TWiG end of Year Review 2015- 6/12/15 at Greenside Community Centre

Present

Nancy and Ethel (Barmoor Hub) Gwenole, Gwen and children, Lesley, Garry, Nick, Di, Anne and Jack

Reminder of themes selected at Feast for the future meeting in October 15

FOOD TRANSPORT ENERGY WASTE

Current commitments:

Use of Wiggio for ease of communication and storage of shared information
Creating and using a TWG blog
LEAF funded leaflets, pop up display banner
Repeat of Food festival 16th July 2016 at Blaydon Burn Farm
Solar Array

Comments from flip charts completed by the group as written with frequencies where relevant:

Strengths

We worked well as a team

Our vision is clear

I enjoy our meetings

Our events are popular

Combining food and meetings is good

Organising and doing events and making them successful

We organised 4 events from scratch

Lots of people know we exist now – starting to have good networking

There is a good feel of community

We have loads of skills, knowledge, experience, networks

Lots of great feedback especially re food at local food festival

We have a blog now

We have some training in Transition and Permaculture to drawer on

Great volunteers at all events

Opportunities

We should connect more with other groups, e.g. Barmoor Hub, High Spen Community Group, Crawcrook and greenside Environment Group etc x2

We know how to run a 4 Rs event

The food fest was ACE! X2

Making Community buildings more sustainable x 2

Linking with other organisations to run a green type course x6

Linking with other organisations for run our events

Collect feedback to improve

“Franchise” swap table idea to other organisations having events

Share more of what we do at events: contacts, ideas

Find ways of linking all the community centres/orgs

Spreading to new areas

Solar panel work? Funding?

Share and rehearse knowledge and arguments about relevant issues using educational orgs to do this

Attend Transition network events to gain ideas as support regionally and nationally

Being present online; blog, Face Book etc

Event bringing together regional Transition type groups; e.g. Greening Wingrove, Transition Tynedale

Weaknesses

Having an event at Halloween

St Joseph`s Blaydon poor `footfall`

Car sharing scheme not clear

Need more press coverage/advertising?

Narrow demographic; already committed people

Not yet finding ways to engage with communities to enable them to have their own vision to pursue, i.e. the initiating group still driving everything so need to move to next stage

Not sure we are getting message across, people enjoy events but we haven’t always told them why?

Growing groups `active `members

We are only a small core group x2

Not converting people who come to events x2

Solar panel (array?) work may take up a lot of our time

Not doing much on energy and transport themes

Interesting

Let`s not overstretch ourselves

We need to have more fun x2

We need good info in hard copy and web based

Increasing number of core members

Value of community networking and support is incalculable to the work of Transition x4

Gateshead Council have a Community Centres network group run by Neighbourhood Management ( Garry Carr) might be worth contacting to get info out.

Can we engage with children more?

Skills exchange

Music based event; music/ceilidh/info/stalls

Themes identified in summary on the day were:

Improved quality and dissemination of information about TWG re what it is and what it is doing.
Better networking
Seeking funding for future initiatives

Issues identified by frequency from flip chart comments above:

I have clumped high scoring comments that appear connected below under suggested themes; this is my interpretation so please feel free to discuss/rearrange/redefine etc

NB There are a number of other comments across all sections that reflect each theme, in some cases I have combined comments which say the same or closely related things.

Working with others to achieve more