Mentors Team Report 2016 05/06

Report for Freegle Mentors

May/ June 2016

Mentors Team

Mentors currently have 9 members and 1 Board observer.

Mentors are; Christian, Diz, David, Tom, Cooky, Jo and Alison. Sheila is the team coordinator Wanda is acting co-coordinator and Andy is our 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.

We have been working on recruiting new mods for groups that are struggling to moderate daily, where the owner has asked us to help and also on caretaker groups that have been handed over by retiring owners to be run centrally. Mentors have a training group that is set up to look like a real working group, called Freegle Freshers. Joy from Devon helps on the training groups and together we work to give new mods the confidence they need.

We try to show the trainee mods (and experienced ones too sometimes) how to use Modtools effectively, we also go through the Yahoo functions, so the new mods have a good idea of how everything works when they join a new team.. For those who want to, we also do a quick course on FD and Twitter.

We hope that for the caretaker groups, the mods we train, will eventually take the group they are training on as the new owner. We have had a few successes so far.

Mentors now has 9 members, John left the team in early June and we would like to thank him for the help he gave during his time with us. The team are all very stretched and we really could do with some fresh volunteers. All you need is patience and the ability to moderate and help another group owner to moderate, or to run an extra group or two. You also need to be happy to follow best practice guidelines on any group that is nationally owned and to use a fixed set of rules to moderate caretaker groups . If you think you can be a mentor, please get in touch atmentors@... 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.

In the last few weeks we have emailed a couple of inactive groups that were reported as auto rejecting emails and they are now back up to speed and moderating regularly. We have also been helping a group to find new moderators and get them trained as the owner wishes to stand down, but wants local people to moderate in her place, to be able to do that. We have so far trained two new mods who have both started. A third mod for the group is about to be trained and the original owner has been able to take a back seat.

We have covered a few groups for holiday cover since early May. If you have a holiday coming up, please don’t leave your group unmoderated, we are happy to help with cover. Contact us on mentors@ilovefreegle.org

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

Blaenau Gwent

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

South Tyneside

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

Blaby

Ealing

Fenland

Hackney

Henfield

Hunts

Kensington and Chelsea

Leamington and Warwick

New Forest West

Stafford

mentors@ilovefreegle.org

Mentor team

Links:

• Mentor Team Remit
• Previous report Mentors Team Report 2016 04
• Following report Mentors Team Report 2016 07