During the lockdowns, staff have been scattered, volunteers may or may not have been able to work with you and, most crucially, opportunities to interact with service-users will have been more limited (although some organisations have learnt more about the people they work with than ever before!) In our last newsletter, we talked about reimagining […]
CEO of Home-Start Oxford, Katharine Barber, came to Charity Mentors because she wanted to reflect the perspectives of their various stakeholders in their strategy. Katharine tells us here, how the strategy review developed. Home-Start Oxford operates in Oxford, the centre and west of the county – one of three Home-Starts in Oxfordshire and part of […]
In each issue, we introduce you to one of our mentors by telling you about their experience and giving you their answers to 3 questions, to include their own ‘top time-saving tip’. Peter Wrigglesworth Peter’s entire career has been within the creative industries. He built a successful communication agency advising clients on communication strategy and […]
One of our mentors, Grant Phillips, shares some practical thoughts on how to approach the coming months…. If there’s one certainty in life right now it’s that the future appears full of uncertainty. Photo by Mark Fletcher-Brown on Unsplash Just before the summer break as we emerged from lockdown, our attention has been focused on […]
At the start of lockdown there was a lot of information about mental health and the necessity to look after ourselves. The coming months are likely to be tough but that advice is still relevant and important. We asked a practitioner of yoga and myofascial health and training based in Oxford, Stephanie Ross-Russell, to devise […]
In each issue, we introduce you to one of our mentors by telling you about their experience and giving you their answers to 3 questions, to include their own ‘top time-saving tip’. Jeremy Swainson Initially with Oxfam, for the past 25 years, Jeremy has been an owner and senior executive of a range of consultancy […]
If you’ve recently been unsuccessful with a grant application, “what do funders want?” is a question you might well be asking! Although funders will give feedback – and if they don’t you should ask for it – the truth is that often feedback is quite general. If a funder has a lot of applications, yours […]
Martin Wilkinson explains what the panel of the Step Change Fund looks for in funding applications. Each fund has its own criteria but Martin’s comments about resilience are worth paying close attention to, as they’re common to most funding applications. Step Change was set up in 2014 as a semi-autonomous fund sitting within Oxfordshire Community […]
In each issue, we introduce you to one of our mentors by telling you about their experience and giving you their answers to 3 questions, to include their own ‘top time-saving tip’. John May John is currently the Secretary General of The Duke of Edinburgh’s International Award; Chair of Trustees of Oxfordshire Scouts; National Trustee […]
How much time do organisations spend agonising over their ‘straplines’? And how much of an impact does a strapline really have? The strapline for Charity Mentors Oxfordshire is ‘clarify, explore, plan’. These 3 words, and the order in which they appear, sum up our approach to mentoring and the time spent by us agonising over […]