Do you have a bit of time to spare to support the Gathering Gates back office? Would you like to be part of the Dream Team, for the Gathering Gates, for Norfolk Grief Tending, or both?
We're looking to bring in volunteer support so we can offer more opportunities to gather together and to tend our hearts and our world. If you have relevant tech, admin and/or comms skills, and a bit of time to spare, and if you're passionate about growing community and building a more beautiful world, we would love to hear from you.
The Back Office Story
Over the last 8 months as part of a lottery funded project, we have successfully hosting 19 gatherings with some 200+ gatherers. These have taken the form of Creative Conversations and Grief Tending workshops (the latter through our partner Norfolk Grief Tending).
Shona and Liz have been busy bees setting up back office support for all this to happen. We've been writing up workflows, setting up an online booking system, liaising with venues, managing mailing lists and finances, developing our social media presence and attending to all the many other details involved in hosting events. In fact, it's a not-very-secret-secret that we're both a bit nerdy around this stuff. We love systems!
Inviting Your Gifts
We're inviting folk to gift time to help with the tasks set out below. We'd also like to invite conversations around what you might need from us – financial and otherwise – in order to offer your support and skills, with a view to potentially weaving this into our fundraising efforts. We can't make any promises, but we want to push the boat out to create win-win scenarios, doing our best to meet and support you in your needs, and making it all fly in the Gift Economy.
These roles could be working with us in our temporary hub (Liz's flat), or working from home, or (preferably) a combination of both. We're also looking at options for shared co-working space, and that could be happening soon. It could be a one-off bit of time – working on a specific project. Or it could be a regular weekly or fortnightly commitment.
Help Needed
We've identified the following areas where we could really use some help, as we consolidate what we've achieved so far and dream into the next cycle. We're sensing great potential for bringing more folk together to tend our hearts, to grow community, and to support our collaborations and projects. All of which is about bringing us into more beauty, more connection, and more harmonious ways of relating with each other, and with nature and the cosmos.
Website development and updates
As well as looking after the Gathering Gates website, we're also tending the Norfolk Grief Tending website (both are on Wix). We need someone who can look after minor updates for us (for one or both of these websites), and to do the odd bit of development work (adding new pages etc). For example, this could be spending an hour (if you are a tech wiz!) to add testimonials, update the events calendar, etc.
Social media
We've got Facebook pages for the Gathering Gates and Norfolk Grief Tending, and we're in the process of adding Facebook groups connected with these pages. We'd like to amplify our social media reach by setting up Instagram accounts, and possibly Twitter as well. Ideally this would mean setting up a social media management tool such as Zapier or Social Bee, so we can automate and integrate our communications across multiple platforms.
Finance and accounts
We're currently managing the accounts for the Gathering Gates (and child projects) on a Libre Office spreadsheet that we've designed in-house. We need help either with developing this system so it's more robust, or (ideally) moving it across to an accounting platform such as Quick Books. We also need help with keeping on track of bank reconciliations, invoice payments and budget monitoring.
Design work
Do you like being creative? We’d love some help with creating our flyers and posters on Canva (or similar) for events and to create some funky templates in Mailchimp. Other kinds of help with graphic design and editing photos welcome too.
Tech support
Can you help with managing our mailing lists on Mailchimp, making changes to our signup form, generating embed code for the website, that kind of thing? We'd also like to set up a workflow system on Miro. Other kinds of general tech support would be amazing, for troubleshooting and catching tasks as they come up. These things can become very time-consuming for gatherers where tech skills aren’t their thing.
Admin support
Help with Gift Aid admin - troubleshooting problems, and compiling Gift Aid info to send to HMRC.
Fundraising
Set up and manage Patreon platform/s. Help with bid writing. Help with identifying potential funders.
Other
Other support would be welcome such as distributing flyers, linking us up to other areas of the community, and speaking about the work of Gathering Gates/Norfolk Grief Tending at your work place.
All offers of support welcome! You may have ideas and offerings of skills we haven’t thought about...we’d love to hear.
If you think you might be able to help, please Contact Us for an informal chat and to find out more. Thanks so much!