Tl;dr: buuusyyyy week because 3 projects collided, as they sometimes do.
For Monday 5th October – Sunday 11th October 2026.
At work:
- Catchment project: regular meetings and check-ins, on tickover.
- Strategy co-design project: making progress week by week, pulling together all the materials for all the engagement streams, getting them translated, and released into the wild. Waiting for the insights to come flocking back like homing pigeons, hopefully. (I put on a navy shirt and wore my “Welsh learner” lanyard to record a little video for the staff team. Felt ever so official.)
- Deep listening project: as project lead, looking after all the setup (policies and processes and making sure everyone involved is supported and safe), and helping my team gear up also.
- Board away day: had the scoping / kick off / information meeting (all rolled into one) with a chair and executive team, about facilitating their board away day in November, and gathered all the info needed to write up a session plan.
With the exception of the catchment project, those 3 projects each needed a big push of committed time in the same week. It sometimes happens when you work on half a dozen projects of different sizes concurrently – they have peaks and troughs and sometimes 2 or even 3 collide and then it’s BUUUUSYYYY.
Deliverables this week:
- Engagement materials for the strategy co-design.
- Draft guidelines and processes for safeguarding and GDPR for the deep listening project, and an internal Miro digital whiteboard of All The Project Things.
Development this week:
- Supporting a team to develop their facilitation skills: scoping meeting and proposal writing, for a sort of training workshop (but super interactive to develop their planning at the same time), and some follow-up mentoring sessions
- Supporting a public board: in conversations about how we can help (we = myself and a fellow facilitator and consultant)
At home:
- 2 HIIT, 2 pilates, and on Sunday went into the sea but only up to my thighs because of fresh ink on my hip (still working on colouring in a tattoo started a long time ago).
- Had a social butterfly week, with a dinner in Bristol, a film evening at a friend’s, painting pottery and dinner at the Goodsheds, another bike ride (yay sunshine), and street food (at the Goodsheds again). Seeing people makes me happy, and I am also happy that I have the energy to do this, when this time last year (last quarter even) it would all have been too overwhelming and tiring.
- I have been out gallivanting so I have not done the darkroom stuff yet.
Hwb – defnyddio fy Nghymraeg (hub – using my Welsh):
Weekly Welsh homework to find something to talk about in class (in Welsh ofc).
- Hmmm. Bit stumped this week, what *have* I been up to? What shall I talk about? I’ve done loads but not necessarily stuff I want to explain! I’ll maybe do a generic “this is what I do for work” thing, and find out how to say ‘facilitation’ in Welsh. 🙂
