Mentors Team Report 2016 03

Report for Freegle Mentors March 2016

Mentors currently have 12 members and 1 Board observer.

Mentors are there to advise new Group Owners in their first 6 months of set up as required and continuously thereafter, if still needed, we give support to struggling groups. We are caretakers for groups that have been given up by their owners and we contact groups that are not being actively moderated to offer help.

If you know of any group that is being left unmoderated for long periods, mentors can be contacted in strictest confidence. We would rather help out and get things back on track before a group ends up being abandoned.

Mentors have been busy trying to contact absent group owners and have had some success.

The South Down Greencycle group was being run by a moderator with limited privileges. Mentors helped him to gain ownership of the group. The new owner has changed the group name to South Down Freegle and is being helped by Amanda to get the group back up and running again. We continued trying to contact a few groups that appear to have been struggling and have managed to make contact with some owners. Two groups that appeared to be abandoned were suddenly and unexpectedly deleted, we assume by the owners. We are still trying to contact the admin teams of two more groups that appear to have been abandoned.

Most of the month has been spent discussing communication between GAT and Mentors. We hope this is almost sorted out now and we will be working together, to keep Freegle groups running well and to ensure the information passed between both teams is improved and shared in a way that is going to benefit all of us.

There was some discussion on whether or not a 192.com account would benefit the team in our attempts to find and contact absent group owners. We are still looking into how far we should go when searching for owners, to offer them help and the result of that discussion will help with deciding if a 192.com account is worth the money that would be spent on it.

Alison has been working on drafting an email for us to send offering help with adding modtools, to all Freegle groups who don’t currently use it. Now that it is free we are trying to get more mods on Modtools, to help moderators to run their groups more effectively and to keep scammers off the groups thus protecting group members.

We have been working with Edward to write a Modtools start up guide, to add to the wiki. Alison is adding the information now and it is still under construction, but we hope to have a decent guide to using the new Modtools on the wiki very soon.

The list below is just for the groups that are currently centrally owned and need new owners and mods. This month no new groups have been added to the list, but none have been removed either.

If any mod teams local to any of these groups would like to take any of these groups on as permanent new owners, please contact us

Barking and Dagenham

Bicester

Blackwater and Yateley

Brewood, Codsall and Stretton Freegle

Bury

Cambridge

Cannock Freegle

Cardiff

Chelmsford

Cheslyn Hay Freeworld recycling

Dudley – Black country Freeworld

Durham

Eastwood

Havering

Lichfield Freeworld Recycling

Llanelli

Llyn Peninsula

Rhonnda Cynon Taf

Scunthorpe

Skegness

Skye and Lochalsh

Taunton

Thrapston

Trafford

Warminster

Warrington

Washington

Wrexham

Yeovil

The list below is of those who just need a little help or are just being cared for temporarily.

Amber Valley

Ealing

Fenland

Hackney

Henfield

Hunts

Kensington and Chelsea

Leamington and Warwick

New Forest West

Stafford

The mentor team is still looking for new mods to help out. if anyone thinks they may be able to mentor a new group owner or caretake a group that has been handed over for Mentors to find new owners, please contact us at mentors@ilovefreegle.org . Please bear in mind some of these groups may need long term caretaking as volunteers can be difficult to find.

All Caretaker groups are added to modtools. It takes a few minutes extra each time you moderate to clear the messages on extra groups.

mentors@ilovefreegle.org

Mentor team

Links:

• Mentor Team Remit
• Previous report Mentors Team Report 2016 02
• Following report Mentors Team Report 2016 04