Can you help our partners at WISH learn how to better help our community by filling in this survey? It should only take 10 minutes of your time and you’ll be in for a chance of winning one of three £50 vouchers!
You may already know that we’re a member of WISH, a county-wide partnership in Oxfordshire run for and by local communities, led by Cherwell Collective. We identify gaps in community infrastructure, and empower people to build climate resilience, keep items in circulation, share surplus, and implement ideas on how to reuse waste.
To respond to what people in the community want, we’d like to hear more about who you are, and what you think and do around the environment, shopping and waste. Your responses will help us paint a picture of our local community and know how to best focus our partnership efforts. We will also repeat this survey over time to help us assess the impact we are having through WISH.
Can you help us find sponsors to support our Repair Cafés?
We’re very grateful for all the volunteers who put their time and skills into running our repair cafés. They deliver an amazing free service for the community.
To keep things running into the future, we’re looking to secure funding for the behind-the-scenes costs. This includes room hire, insurance and compliance (health & safety, volunteer management etc). The total annual cost is about £5k and we receive around £1k in donations from guests.
If you have any contacts interested in sponsoring us, from a single repair café to a longer ongoing agreement, we’d love to hear from them.
If you’re keen to help out as an individual, all donations via our crowdfunder page make a real difference in keeping SHARE Oxford going, and are eligible for gift aid. Or if you’re interested to volunteer with us or support in other ways, please do get in touch.
This last few weeks, amongst all the noise of the news cycle and the daunting challenge of the climate emergency, little new good things keep happening here at SHARE. It’s made me think about progress, how so often things start small, break through then get big. I hope I can share a bit of that inspiration here…
There’s more of us!
Since I joined SHARE in 2021, every 3-6 months someone gets in touch asking for advice on setting up a Library of Things. Then, in 2023, county council funding helped open three more LoTs in Oxfordshire. In the last two weeks I’ve had more conversations than ever with people setting up Libraries of Things or Repair Cafés in Swindon, Skipton, the Black Country, High Wycombe and Chipping Norton. The Resource Guide and video from the council project are proving valuable. I’ve learned from each person I spoke with and the collaboration is exciting.
So small, so big
I love how in Oxford you can sense local connecting to global. In 2020 I learned a lot from OCS’s brilliant School of Climate Change. This week, this video popped up from The Smith School’s Prof. Hepburn explaining how much faster progress on energy systems has been than we expected then. It’s 15 minutes that challenges much of the doom I read in my news feeds. A few clicks later this TED talk gave a similar picture of exponential progress beating expectations across the world. More locally, last week we joined our first Circular Economy strategy session with the County Council, this Saturday we are making smoothies with Oxfordshire Recycles at Flo’s Place in the Park, taking part in the launch of the Local Policy Lab, including the council and both universities, and exhibiting at Brooke’s University’s first Sustainability Expo. It feels amazing to be playing our part in the wider community taking new steps.
Growing and learning
It’s been exciting to see these “green shoots” breaking through, after all that unseen effort, ready to accelerate further. I’m wondering how many more are coming. To everyone working hard just beneath the surface, good luck and we can’t wait to see the results of your efforts!
If you want to get involved with SHARE, or to discuss ideas with a team of people who are getting stuck in, do get in touch. Our volunteers constantly inspire me and we want to do more to learn from our community too. We look forward to hearing from you.
So, if you’re keen to prepare the ground at your allotment, trim that hedge before nesting season, tidy up the lawn or tackle that tricky patch at the back of the garden, we hope you’ll find our new equipment makes the job easier. We’ve been impressed by how powerful and robust the tools feel, amazing how things have come on since some of the older electrical kit we used to have!
We also hope we might inspire you to try out battery garden equipment for the first time, a great option if you’re wondering what to buy when your trusty old 2-stroke finally needs to be laid to rest.
If you want to find out more or have a try of whatever’s in stock, do pop in and have a chat with our librarians.
The Library of Things is now open on Mondays! We hope this will make it more convenient to use our services. Our opening hours stay the same on Thursday and Saturday:
Monday
12-6pm
Thursday
12-6pm
Saturday
10am-1pm
We’re pleased to welcome Ranulf, who will be managing the library on Mondays, supported by our skilled volunteers (including Tom here in our photo!)
A big thank you to everyone using the Library and all those who have contributed funds so we can get to this point. We’re excited to be at this stage and we look forward to seeing you soon.
WISH is a Climate Action Partnership looking to build infrastructure for the first truly circular economy in the UK. Following a pilot phase in Kidlington, supporting outreach and and practical solutions to reduce waste including direct redistribution and repurposing, WISH has now received £1.5m from the National Lottery Community Fund to expand this work across the county.
We are one of more than 30 organisations in the network, including Oxford United Football Club and Oxford University Development, Botanic Gardens, and Natural History Museum. The National Lottery Community Fund’s Climate Action Fund directly supports work by Cherwell Collective, Good Food Oxfordshire, Community Action Groups, Oxford City Farm, Thames Valley Environmental Records (TVERC), Wild Oxfordshire, Oxford Food Hub and us.
Achieving more together
Overall, WISH aims to improve infrastructure and increase transparency to support waste reduction and sustainable consumption. Whilst we will continue to focus on sharing and repair of household “stuff”, the network brings together experts in supporting nature, making great choices on food, creative use of waste, carbon literacy and more and will build an inspiring, more complete picture of sustainable choices we can all enjoy making.
SHARE has been granted £42k over the next 5 years, which we’ll use to:
enhance our library of things and repair cafés
help open more libraries of things and repair cafés, including reaching communities we don’t currently serve
help build a map and calendar to make it easier to find sharing, repairing and second hand services and events in the county
share findings with the network and impact evaluation team
contribute to joint promotion of WISH work
We are thrilled to be involved and look forward to sharing news from the network over the coming months!
This Black Friday, 24th November, from 11am-7pm, we’re running a toy swap at Westgate Oxford. Drop off a good quality toy that’s no longer played with and take home a new (to you) toy!
In the UK, an astounding 25 million Christmas Toys go unused and we were delighted to be invited to join Westgate’s “Wasteless Wonderland” Market to offer something a bit different this year.
The SHARE Oxford team will be on hand too if you’d like to learn more about the Library of Things or Repair Cafés.
We’re grateful to John Lewis for donating some ex-display toys and puzzles to contribute to what you bring along on the day. Any excess donations will be given to local charities to distribute before Christmas.
You may have spotted plenty of activity at this year’s #RepairDay talking about “Right to Repair”. It’s great to see progress on this issue, which will help communities like us do more for ourselves.
What’s this about?
The main “ask” is for legislators to help remove barriers to repair, for example manufacturers using software to block use of parts. Right-to-Repair Europe summarise this in a neat animation complete with a soundtrack which was presumably produced on a well-maintained 32-year old Atari.
The declaration acknowledges that in the UK we have one of the biggest e-Waste challenges in the world and asks the government to support those of us working for a more sustainable future. The requests are:
Making repair more affordable, through tax reductions and repair vouchers.
Expanding the UK’s right to repair regulations to cover all consumer products, strengthen design standards and remove barriers to repair for everyone.
Introducing a repair index to help the public choose more repairable and durable products.
Introducing requirements and targets for reuse and repair to be prioritised over recycling and providing investment to make this a reality. This should be a key part of amended extended producer responsibility rules.
Supporting a new generation of repairers through repair training, accreditation and apprenticeships.
If you’d like to get involved, you can ask your organisation to sign up, or use the online tool to quickly email your local MP. Let’s get Annelise Dodds and Layla Moran’s names on that list!
We’re delighted to announce that we’re recruiting for an additional Librarian of Things. If all goes well, we’re planning to open on Mondays from January, helping make hiring and sharing more convenient for more people.
If you’re interested in the role, please check out the job advert here and get your application to us by the end of November.
A big thank you to everyone who has contributed funds or time to help us get to this point. We couldn’t do it without you.
Finally, if you are able to help spread the word to make sure this opportunity reaches as many people as possible, particularly those who don’t already know about SHARE Oxford, we would be very grateful.
Big thank you to our volunteer Ranulf for putting together a great new video which explains how the Library of Things works. Check it out on the “How to” page for the Library.
What else would you like to see videos of? Would you be interested to share photos or video of the projects you’ve done? If so, please give Ben a shout and he’ll put you in touch with Ranulf!
