Please fill in our survey on volunteering, cooking for your neighbours (all will become clear) and how the whole process might be designed to make it as easy as possible with the right support and incentives you.

We would really appreciate it if you could also spread the word by sharing it with your friends too.

If you would like to support the project, let us know over on Simpl – the social innovation market place.

They say good things come in threes and given the progress made in bringing a great partnership together for the we:care community kitchens project in the past couple weeks I’m starting to believe that. A huge part of the project is around demonstrating a human-centred and inclusive design approach, and a key part of this is having key stakeholders involved with the service we are looking at. Our Surrey County Council and District Council partners are providing a crucial steer to the project, opening doors and indicating what success of our eventual prototype service will look like (to be developed in our design stage in a couple of weeks). While Surrey are connecting the project to meals on wheels users and commissioners at a council level, we were also keen to involve local service providers early on and encourage them to come on board with any resulting prototype. Enter WRVS…. WRVS got in touch with us having heard about the project online and after a quick chat we soon realised that this is the perfect project for them to be involved with as a service provider. WRVS are an age positive national charity who have been around for 70 years providing services from Meals on Wheels to community transport and are now “determined to play a thoroughly modern role in providing services for older people”. WRVS are particularly interested in a more comunity orientated service for Meals on Wheels which funnily enough is our exact aim in this project. We need you!

Oh, did we mention.. please fill in our survey – thanks!

With the team in place, last week also saw the start of our street interviews. We want to understand what it would take for more (and more diverse) groups of people to get involved in volunteering. With that in mind, we took to the streets of London and we’ve been impressed by how keen people have been to give their views. The purpose of the interviews has been to ask people on the spot how much free time they feel they have and what kinds of rewards (if any) they look for in helping others. While many are keen to learn new skills or boost their CV, it’s been interesting to hear that others (ok most) really just want an easier way to get involved (“I’m just a bit put off by the bureaucracy and paper work needed just to help someone else out!” – Dave, 32) as well as some transparency in terms of the impact their time and effort makes to a charity (“I’d really love to see the impact of my time in the big picture” – Jaymie, 18). We’re still looking to hear back from anyone and everyone so we’ve prepared this online questionnaire that we really hope some of you would fill in (3-5 minute job and if required I can reimburse you with a thank you hug – for real). Please spread the word so we can get loads of opinions included. This week and next sees us interviewing people who use Meals on Wheels regularly thanks to the hard work of WRVS and Elmbridge Borough Council (Surrey). Next up, we will be organising a workshop with a selection of our stakeholders from the project to show them what we’ve found and start to design our prototype service. Stay tuned.