Archive for the ‘Charities’ Category
WinterWillow prodution team have just relocated to new premises in Cambridge.
We are just south of the Newmarket Road, on the Barnwell Business Park.
Winter Willow, Part of WinterComfort, Unit 21, Barnwell Business Park,
Off Barnwell Drive, Cambridge, CB5 8UZ
Travelling into the city down Newmarket Road? Just past the City Airport – find us down the A1134.
(Truck image: Alan_Cook_Removals Ltd: geograph.org.uk)
You can currently see a very nice article about WinterWillow on the Home & Garden online pages of Cambridge-news.co.uk
Written by Emma Higginbotham, the piece illustrates the history and background to the formation of WinterWillow as a craft based social enterprise.
It is also an opportunity to highlight the ‘green’ credentials of WinterWillow and to show the care and craft that the WinterWillow team put into the creation of their woven willow eco-coffins.
Check out the online article here for more information about us.
You can visit our own web pages here.
WinterWillow - the woven English willow eco-coffin.
Image: Rob Janko of the WinterWillow team
We have just designed and published a new WinterWillow eco-coffin pamphlet.
Simple, with some really great images as illustrations of our craft persons work.
Visit our WinterWillow home page to download and view your copy in pdf format.
WinterWillow team – helping you make the right choice for you…
We have created an images page on the main WinterWillow web site, where you can view and download pictures of our work and team members.
You can download higher resolution images of our products and people. So that if you are blogging or compiling a news article about WinterWillow, then please feel free to download and use our resources.
You can find an image gallery and download links here.
The WinterWillow team…
The Charities Aid Foundation have just launched a new web service that enables site visitors to map and explore the activities of over 160,000 charities.
This free web resource lets you filter your search requirements by any of 17 variables, you can create lists and download them and see historical change in the UK charitable sector over time.
CAF also make available on the Charity Trends web site a variety of research publications, both free and by subscription.
There is a blog and you can contact CAF with questions and queries from the site.
This is an invaluable resource, both for researching other charities in your geographical area for example, but also providing data for the contextual analysis of your own charity – ideal for funder or boards of management reporting.
Have a look at Charity Trends from CAF and let us know what you think.
BT have just launched MyDonate, a new service which will enable charities to more efficiently collect donations.
Online giving is not new, but the difference is that BT will, at the moment, make no charge for its service, with the giver only paying the card charges for his or her transfer to the charity. (BT says absorbing the cost of the scheme is part of its existing commitment to charitable support).
This new service is designed for registered UK charities and BT has collaborated with major charities in the UK, such as Cancer Research and the NSPCC to develop its offer.
This scheme compares favourably with JustGiving for example. This popular online service for charities charges the charity £15 a month and take 5% of your money in administration charges. The BT scheme means that all your donation goes to the charity.
If your charity has another online service for donations we think this new scheme from BT is worthy of your attention.
If you are a newly registered charity looking to explore the issues of online donations, then check out the MyDonate page from British Telecom.
Is change happening in our sector?
You can now find WinterComfort for the Homeless on Facebook.
Why not connect with our parent charity and keep up to date with all the current news, as well as helping our charity celebrate twenty years of supporting the homeless in Cambridge.
Graham Seed the actor who played Nigel Pargetter in The Archers for nearly thirty years is coming to Cambridge.
Guests can buy tickets to the event and hear Graham’s observations on the contentious story line which saw his departure form this iconic programme after such a long time.
Our parent charity will receive the profits from the event – in order to support the work of WinterComfort for the Homeless.
It is fitting that the event will raise money for WinterComfort – as WinterWillow, one of our social enterprises, makes English woven willow coffins and it it was Nigel Pargetta’s last wish to be buried in a woven eco-coffin.
The event will be held at The Law Faculty of the University of Cambridge, between 6.00 and 8.00pm on the 13th April 2011.
You can purchase tickets on the night for £12 or from WinterComfort ahead of the event for only £10.
Contact WinterComfort on 01223 518140 or email info@wintercomfort.org.uk for more information. Your WinterWillow contact is Tracy O’leary.
Do book early for this sure to be popular event…and support a great cause too, to help tackle homelessness in our community.
You can find details of Nigel Pargetter on the The Archers character page here.
A fuller press release about the event and it’s organisers can be found on the Corporate Social Responsibility Newswire.
See you at The Law Faculty for this exciting evening of lively reminiscence!
We are in the throes of creating the next generation of our WinterWillow web site.
The design brief was to make the space lighter, more readable, with a better use of visuals and to simplify the navigation.
A short brief that, like all simple statements, includes some complexity in delivery. However, a new version has been posted to our servers and please feel free to comment on the birth of this new willow creation.
There will be more changes in the weeks to come as we refine the content and develop our collaborative ideas on coffin marketing and our basketry business.
Watch the willow…
The Charity Commission has just published a report, Strength in Numbers, on the experiences of small charities working together.
The report highlights a number of benefits to small charities in collaborating with other charitable bodies.
The loss of key volunteers, particularly with specialist skills, the delivery of other specialist resources around income generation or in other new development ideas.
The report comes at a time that may herald some volatility for small charities in the immediate future. Some 2,515 charities with incomes of less than £250,000 per annum responded to the survey.
The report also includes details of tools and templates to help charities work together. We liked the bassac tools page particulalrly – with its links to even wider resources on the subject.
Issues around small charity collaboration, the report states, can include the space and time to identify suitable partners – as well as the issue of not being approached to become a partner.
The difficulties in collaboration, where it did occur, were the joint bidding for contracts and the appropriate share of revenue, the complexity of funding applications where alignment of interests or philosophy were not easy and the processes of formally sharing information between charities.
These can be key obstructers to any sort of partnership working.
Could we not argue though, that if your small charity is considering new programmes of work or areas of funding, or if your charity social enterprise needs to expand its service base – then the current economic climate could be just the driver to pour oil on some of these choppier collaborative waters.
You can find the Charity Commission report online here…
