Ben enjoyed last week’s talk with Speak up for our Planet, an apolitical online community dedicated to informing and inspiring action on climate change.
He explained a bit about our Library of Things: the story so far, what lessons we’ve learned, and our plans for the future. The audience had great questions on the sort of details that matter if you’re getting going. If you’re wondering about setting something up for your community, we hope this is a useful watch!
A big thank you to everyone who has contributed funds or time to help us get to this point. We’re thrilled by how many more people are visiting and using our service since we’ve opened this third day a week.
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.
To celebrate this year’s Great Big Green Week, we want to help keep everyone’s IT running smoothly and ensure no older devices are going to waste, passing them on to people who need them.
On Monday 10th and Thursday 13th June, 12-6pm, we’ll have digital volunteers on-site with us at the Library of Things to help with any queries and accept donations for people in need.
We’re here to help
Does your laptop / tablet / phone need a bit of love? We can help iron out software niggles or simple hardware fixes, or advise on best approaches for more complicated repairs.
Are you ready to pass it on? We’re always grateful for donations of laptops, tablets or phones to Getting Oxfordshire Online, which we accept whenever we’re open. On “tech rescue” days, we’ll have people on-hand to help with donation: maybe helping get photos off your laptop, resetting your phone ready for re-use or checking damage to see if we’ll be able to wipe and use your device.
Yes, I’ve got a tech query!
If you have a device or question you’d like help with, please drop us an email at hello@shareoxford.org with a little detail (what device you have, what the problem is and when would suit you to come in). We’ll let you know how busy the days are looking and make sure we have enough volunteers on-hand, and we will try to arrange some useful spares and tools.
You’re also welcome to just drop in on the day with your kit if you don’t mind grabbing a cuppa and waiting for someone to be available to give you a hand.
If you’re comfy fixing IT or helping people use it, and you’d like to join to help out on the day, we’d love to hear from you. Give Ben a shout at hello@shareoxford.org!
We always love hearing what our Library of Things has helped you get up to. Your creativity, skills and, occasionally, determination in the face of challenges are always an inspiration! We are regularly approached by others hoping to set up LoTs in their communities and these stories help them to understand how they could be most useful too, so we’re looking to improve these “testimonials” in our reports and website.
Examples of things that we’re interested to hear are:
What project or activity did you do?
How did the process go using the Library of Things?
Did hiring from us save you money or maybe enable you to do something you weren’t going to before?
Do you feel we helped you to be more sustainable in your life?
What did you most enjoy?
Do you have any feedback or suggestions to help us improve?
If you’re up for sharing snippets, from a photo, social media post or brief one-liner to a more thorough case study or interview, please drop Ben a line. And to everyone who already has, thank you, we really appreciate it!
We’re a little later with last year’s impact report, as it’s also our first Trustees’ Annual Report since becoming a charity. We hope you enjoy reading all about the 12 months of SHARE Oxford, up to June 2023!
We saw continued growth in customers for our Library of Things and guests at our Repair Cafés, with some lovely photos of what people have been up to with the kit they hired from us.
And this year in particular, thanks to support from the county council and CAG, we got involved with more collaboration, helping others launch their own LoTs and repair cafés. A theme which is continuing strongly this year.
What do you think?
We’re always interested to hear thoughts, questions or feedback, so do give Ben a shout if you’d like to discuss anything in this report. And we look forward to sharing our next one soon!
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.
