Mobile Bike Workshop! Start Up15. Week 1

Building a community around an idea.. week 1 of pop up community bike workshop start up.
Last week was the beginning of our EdVenture adventure! Arriving Monday morning not knowing what was instore and new to Frome was exciting and a little daunting.. we quickly introduced ourselves, and sat down to begin, this is the team for the next 10weeks.
We have been given the task of creating a mobile community bike workshop that is to be transported around Frome packed into an electric cargo bike, ideas were whizzing around my head but first we had to become a team and build our own start up 15 community.
Our first team task was to imagine Frome in 2030, which we soon found out was a long enough timescale to dream big. This is what social enterprises are all about, the power to change our future, hopefully for the better!

After coming up with lots of ideas we then talked about what was possible, illustrated some of our ideas and presented them imagining we had achieved and implemented our plan for a super green Frome. This was a great way to think positively and expansively about what was possible. It also brought us into working together, communicating ideas and presenting as a team.

Tuesday morning brought colour, creativity and some closer team bonding by sharing some of our personal journeys of how we got to this point in life. This highlighted how different everyone’s story is and also how connected we all are through humanity, hard times and good.I really enjoyed this task as it brought us closer together as a group and gave me a chance to do some drawing and colouring (something which was long overdue!)

Wednesday turned out to be a big day. We had 5 hours to design, plan and put on an event, that evening, for 30 people (who luckily had already been invited) it seemed like ALOT of pressure. The excited energy in the room was palpable and we harnessed it well, using various tools that we had been taught during the previous days. Fast forward a few hours and there we were 5.30pm moving tables around and eagerly anticipating the arrival of our guests.. this event was to start building a community around our project, for people interested to meet us and to share some more information about what we were planning to do.

After a presentation of our project and Q&A session we all sat down to eat some delicious curry from Mahesh. The general chat was about bikes and all things cycling, we gathered information, met local supporters and had a bright, successful evening. Quite an achievement for a days work!
The next day the team was buzzing, with a positive event experience under our belts we had definitely bonded our start up 15 community. This was affirmed by group discussion and feedback on our ‘performance’ praise all round! I ended the week on a high, looking forward to what was instore…