Weeknote February 01 – 04
What did you do this week, Laura? Oh, nothing much, I just got to interact with loads of amazing people who are working to make the world a better place :)
Monday
Whirlwind of a day. I started In an APAC timezone appropriate meeting with two lovely Greenpeace-esque colleagues before switching gears to the Catalyst definition project. I had a look at the application materials for Pennysmart, a charity that does economic advising for marginalized communities before jumping into a call with them.
I spent some time listening to their context, doing a benchmarking survey with them and then debriefing with myself in note form. After that I worked on the next episode of the Learning Fractal and then had a weekly with my WAO colleagues.
Tuesday
Spent the entire morning recording and recording a new podcast, which we’re being a bit vague about in an effort to get it together and do it right. The title is rad, the concept has come together, I did the cover art (and like it). It’s fun. I’m looking forward to nailing the process so we can relax and just talk about stuff (while also having a structure that people want to listen to).
After a quick, smoothie-based lunch, I scanned the information I have on Caxton Youth Organization, a charity working with 11 – 25 year olds, many with developmental disabilities. I learned about Makaton, a signaling language and kind of codec for people who have problems communicating. I was interested to think so specifically about human communication again, and I jumped into my call with Caxton Youth. These three lovely people who were kind enough to teach me how to signal “Chicken”. Caxton has a Weekly Makaton series on Instagram where they show how to signal all sorts of things.
Later I did more Learning Fractal stuff, tried to fix an old reference to WAO, caught up on these weeknotes and then wrote a couple sentences in my newsletter.
Wednesday
Seeing my Thursday calendar led to panic, so I took the morning off and went bombing through my city on my beautiful cross bike. When I came back, I cleaned my bike because I went full off-road in the mud, and then cleaned myself because I was also covered in mud.
In the afternoon I chatted with two different Greenpeace colleagues, and then hacked on a RASCI for our Catalyst definition project before meeting with a lovely participant from an organization that provides spiritual services, the Parochial Church Council of the Ecclesiastical Parish of Totnes with Bridgetown. This organization is dealing with rural poverty and accessibility issues, especially amongst the elderly. Given a target audience that likely doesn’t have much access to technology, how can the 9 churches working to build community and compassion offer services? I have ideas ;)
After that, I panicked about Thursday again, and then prepared myself by opening all the tabs I’m going to need and mentally reassuring myself that I’ve totally got this. It’s not like I haven’t done a full day of back to back meetings before.
Thursday
I woke up and felt completely calm, so I rode that wave all day and it was great. I did a project management call with my co-op peeps about the Catalyst Definition programme, and then I spoke to three different charities to further prepare:
- Action Hampsire, an advisory organization working with social enterprises and helping them to thrive. In the Catalyst Definition programme, we’ll be helping them further define their challenges and probably zone in on some nerdy solutions to common problems.
- BeatsBus, an organization working to provide musical mentorship and creative expression workshops and resources to marginalized youth (and adults too!). They have a mobile recording studio! We’re going to help them further define and streamline their mentorship initiatives.
- Recycling Lives, an organization that has several pillars of support. They work with offender rehabilitation, housing support and tackling food poverty. We’re going to focus in on the food poverty programme, which has seen a massive increase since the time of Covid, but we’ll do so with a holistic mindset.
Friday
Not sure what I’ll do tomorrow. Write my newsletter because I haven’t done that yet. And then I need to record more Maybe Zombies chapters. You know, stuff.