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Educafe

Newsletter June 2021

Hello from Educafe, we hope you are safe and well and huge welcome to our June Newsletter.  A lot has happened over the last few months and progress has been more gradual than we would have liked due to the lock down restrictions.   Although this has been frustrating, it has afforded us time to establish other areas of our project.

Firstly, we must thank our amazing volunteers that have come forward to support Educafe.   Seriously, a massive thank you! We have been quite overwhelmed by the enthusiasm to get involved with us and for the wealth of experience and ideas that the volunteers are bringing with them.  We hope to offer official volunteer positions in the very near future and we will be sharing more about volunteering in our next newsletter.  Anyone interested in volunteering with us can apply here.

People

We are delighted to welcome Monika Lasko as Educafe’s Administrator.  Monika will be making sure that everything runs smoothly and supporting our different projects.  She is an exceptional administrator, and we are really looking forward to working with her. We also welcome Rachel Flynn-Delargy who joins us as our Language Support Teacher. Rachel will be working with Clare to develop new and innovative courses to help non-native English speakers live and work in the UK. Rachel is an extremely experienced teacher of English, Maths and I.T. She is currently delivering our Job Support Club and English for Work Course. We welcome Naaz Syed as our events and website calendar co-ordinator.  Naaz will be managing and updating our calendar and events page, so please send us anything you would like to see included.  We have also appointed a much-needed Social Media Co-ordinator.  We are very excited that Zara Preston will be joining us from August to establish Educafe’s social media channels. We are also welcoming Janine Ford to keep us on our toes as she focuses on projects to get us all more active. This is going to start with new mums walks and yoga. More info to follow.  Caroline Ffrench Blake is volunteering to manage our English conversation corner at our weekly Community Cafes. This is a much needed service and we are so happy that Caroline has joined us. Eloi Puig-Mayenco is joining us to explore our ‘Their Futures’ mentoring project for young people, children of migrant workers, refugees and asylum seekers.  More about this in our next newsletter and a huge thank you to those of you have said you are interested in mentoring, we will be in touch soon.

Social Media and Website

We are now regularly posting on Facebook and Instagram, so please follow us for community news, COVID-19 updates and partner information.  It would be great if you could follow and share these with your friends and families, the more the merrier!  Here are the links

Instagram

Facebook

As you can see our website is now up and working.  We value any feedback to make visiting the website easy to use, so please let us know if something isn’t working.  The site will be constantly active and updated to share Educafe information, weekly council news and important COVID-19 messages.  We also hope to include partner news and events.  In addition, there will be links to local education and training opportunities.  The website will be the vehicle we use to engage with the hardest to reach areas of West Berkshire.  We are encouraging all community groups to share their news and events with us so that we can share these with the wider community.

Job Support Club and ESOL for Work

We are currently delivering our first language support course, which is being enjoyed by 16 learners.  Including the staff, the group is made-up of 13 nationalities, Irish, Polish, Bangladesh, Hong Kong, India, Ecuador, French, Brazil, Lithuania, Sri Lanka, Syria, Columbia and Spain. A huge thank you to our partners, West Berkshire Council, Job Centre Plus, Sovereign Housing, Graft Thames Valley, National Careers Service and the Volunteer Centre Newbury for supporting us.  This is a pilot project, and we are looking for funding to deliver more of these over the next 12 months.

Events

Educafe will be at the Thatcham Family Fun Day this Sunday, 27th June, from 11.00am – 4.00pm.  It would be great to meet you in person, please come along and say ’hello’.

Finally, our much-awaited Community Café launches on Wednesday 7th July, details below.  Please come along and meet us in person.  Free drinks and cake for everyone!

We can’t end this newsletter without sending our heartfelt congratulations to Colline, Adam and Kudzai on the new addition to their family.  Little Nyasha was born last week and is keeping everyone busy. We can’t wait to meet her!

Thank you to everyone who is supporting Educafe. Please check back to see what’s happening and what’s new.

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