Events

How does our built environment affect whether we feel included and socially connected or lonely and isolated?

Have your say in the current consultation on Reading’s town centre and ensure that future developments redesigns have a positive effect on all people at risk of loneliness and isolation.

Plus all the usual networking opportunities, funding and service updates.

Free event, please use the link below to book your place:
www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/ready-friends-befriending-forum-tickets

Reading, RG1 3BB

The biggest ‘picnic in the park’ returns to Reading (Covid permitting). It brings together food, music, community stalls, workshops and local producers. It’s a fantastic celebration of local food sustainability.

You can be part of this by volunteering or growing produce (see details on the website). Or just come along to enjoy food prepared and served by Reading College catering students, made from locally grown fruit and vegetables.

Don’t miss out! Reading Town Meal helps to make Reading a special place.

Website: www.readingtownmeal.org.uk

Are you a volunteer-led, small group that’s embedded in your community? Do you want to find out more about funding, training, governance, publicising your work and developing your group? Are you keen to network and share with other small groups?

If yes, then you are warmly invited to join the Small Groups Learn and Share Network, which brings together Reading’s small and emerging community groups to learn, share and grow stronger together.

Please join us on September 28 from 11:00-12.30 for the next Network event, which will include:

• Sharing our experience of post-pandemic reopening services and events.
• Hearing about an exciting new funding opportunity to co-design and deliver mental health and wellbeing workshops for your communities.
• Funding session.
• Lots of opportunity to network, share your own stories and challenges and to get information on training, events and local community news.

Free event, but please use the link below to register your place:
www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/rva-small-groups-learn-and-share-network-tickets

The Volunteer Coordinators’ Network meeting provides a space for those who oversee the work of volunteers to seek peer support in a confidential space from others in a similar role. It is an opportunity to share best practise and to learn from the rich experiences of colleagues working across our diverse sector.

Please register via the button below and further details and joining instructions will be sent in due course.

Register Here

Volunteers and volunteering have been at the forefront of the emergency response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The response has seen many taking up volunteering for the first time and has resulted in innovations in the ways that organisations have recruited, utilised and supported volunteers. However, for some, the pandemic has seen them unable to continue with the volunteering they had been doing before the outbreak whilst some organisations have seen a significant decline in volunteer engagement.

As our town starts to move cautiously forward with the recovery from the economic, social, and health impacts of the pandemic it feels certain that volunteers and volunteering will continue to have a central role to play. This workshop seeks to build on the research work undertaken over the previous 4 months to explore the opportunities and challenges volunteer-involving organisations and volunteers may face in the coming years.

In this online workshop, we are looking for inputs from all those with an interest in volunteering in our town to help shape a collaborative Volunteering Strategy for Reading’s Post-Covid Recovery. This includes staff and volunteers working within local not-for-profits, those involved in informal community action, those who benefit from the work of volunteers and anyone else with an interest in volunteering in our town.

More details on the themes of the event will be sent in due course but please register via the button below now to let us know you would like to be involved and share with us any initial thoughts you might have.

Register Here