We’re celebrating International Women’s Day at Loaf today, reminding ourselves of its early 20th Century origins, when on 8th March 1917 women marched through St Petersburg, demanding Bread and Peace, instigating a general strike, the abdication of the Tsar and a revolution. Serious girl power.

We stand on the shoulders of countless women whose political work and direct action mean that we have rights, opportunities and pleasures that they didn’t – we’re celebrating them and we also wanted to share some things we’re proud of here at Loaf, where, if you have visited us, you’ll know that lots of lovely women and a few lovely men work (and also collectively own and run the business).

The key thing for us, is that it’s really not about Girl Bosses, it’s about no bosses. As a worker co-operative all our staff have an equal stake and responsibility in running Loaf, and equal rewards too. Over the past couple of years we’ve been particularly focussed on how best to allow our team to balance family and work, with well paid parental leave and flexibility in the rota. It’s hard to get right but we try to extend some recognition to the work that goes on in the home, as well as the work that goes on at work. We hope this will keep great women working at Loaf, baking bread, serving in the shop, teaching in the cookery school, doing VAT returns, baking cakes for as long as we’re here.

There are some events going on in Birmingham to mark the day, including a free breakfast hosted by our friends at Artefact Cafe (they will be serving our bread) and a rally at midday in Victoria Square. However you celebrate the day, have a good one!

Oh and p.s. International Men’s day is on 19th November (thanks Richard Herring!) ;0)

We are now closed for Christmas – reopening on Saturday 6th January.

Thanks everyone for your support this year – Happy Christmas!

Great photo from yesterday morning’s 8.15am opening by one of our bakers, Sarah Frost. Patiently queueing people and pigeons.

NEW in the shop!

We have totes (£5), linen teatowels/couches (£10), pins (£3) and beautiful maslin Saturday sourdoughs (£3.50)

Perfect stocking fillers! In case you missed it, we have slightly different Christmas hours:

Thursday 21st December – 12pm – 6.30pm

Friday 22nd December – 8.15am – 1pm (we’re pretending it’s a Saturday!)

Saturday 23rd December – 8.15am – 1pm

Sunday 24th December CLOSED

Monday 25th – 5th January CLOSED

Saturday 6th January OPEN! 8.15am – 1pm

Tuesday 9th January – 12pm – 6.30pm (as normal)

As of Tuesday 9th January we’ll be doing pastries EVERY DAY!!!!!

Screenprinted totes & teatowels by local screenprinter Do Make Say Ink, badges manufactured in Birmingham by BadgesPlus.

Our next pop-up is on Bonfire Night! GUY PORKS.

Join us on Sunday 5th November before you head to your fireworks night celebrations.

There’ll be thematic cakes. We’ll also have sparklers for the queue party!

Facebook event link here.

http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/woman-dies-after-pershore-road-13739891

A petition calling for the protection of Birmingham’s cyclists is gaining traction – addressed to Birmingham City Council and the recently formed Transport for West Midlands. The leaders of these organisations Cllr Ian Ward, the WM Mayor Andy Street need to be reminded of the lack of progress their organisations are making toward improving provision for the needs of the most simple and basic transport user groups and the need for positive action now.

A report from 2 years ago showed that 4 Cyclists are injured on Birmingham’s roads on average EVERY day. The Pershore Road was highlighted as having one of the top 3 most dangerous junctions.

http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/revealed-birminghams-most-dangerous-roads-9501314

PLEASE SIGN AND SHARE THE PETITION it means a lot to us.

https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/stop-killing-birmingham-cyclists

We’ve just announced the winners of our Sourdough September competition – Gosia Trelka (1st place) and Jo Carr (2nd place).  First prize was a place on our Sourdough course – and second prize a baking book from our book shop! Congratulations!

During September:

• We had daily tasters of our regular sourdough during the week, and on Saturdays, tasters of our Saturday special maslin loaf
• We taught 30 people bread-making skills on our courses in our cookery school
• We sold 1846 *sourdough* loaves (this includes our rye bread)
• We sold 48 slices of sourdough pizza
• We had 62 people sign up and enter our competition
• We were featured on Delicious Magazine’s website in their Sourdough September highlights
• We had Jack Spicer Adams come in and take new photos for us because we’re going to be updating our website – look at our gorgeous sourdoughs above!

We’re fully booked for Sourdough courses for 2017 but will be announcing the 2018 dates imminently. We have many other courses available – please see our courses calendar to see if anything takes your fancy.

You can find out more about the Real Bread campaign’s mission on their website.

We have a vacancy at Loaf! The full job advert and description is available on our jobs page. Please share – and please apply!

If you have any questions then get in touch with our team, we’ll be happy to talk through any queries.

Did you know that Loaf is a worker co-operative? We haven’t always been – it’s hard to be a co-operative when you only have one member! But, since opening up on the high street in Stirchley and expanding the team, we have adopted a co-operative model of running things around here. For us this means that the eight of us who are employed by Loaf work together as a team to manage the business. We are paid equally and are all very invested in making Loaf a lovely place to visit and a lovely workplace too. We all have our different strengths and talents in the day to day running of the bakery and cookery school and work pretty independently lots of the time, but long term and strategic decisions are made together, guided by a strong set of core values and aims which have been with Loaf since its inception.

Aside from our internal structure, being a worker co-operative also means we are part of a long standing and international movement committed to the seven co-operative principles.  All of them are important but, and maybe particularly in the lead up to Christmas, the seventh, concern for the community, is especially pertinent. Our fellow Stirchley co-operators, Birmingham Bike Foundry, have been working hard raising money to send to another worker co-operative bakery, this one in Northern Syria. The city of Kobane has been in the news often over the past four years of war in Syria, because of the destruction and chaos brought by IS militants during the 2014 siege and because of the inspiring response of the region’s citizens, who are remaking Rojava on radical democratic principles.

The money raised will be going to a group of women who are working to found a co-operative bakery to provide, just like Loaf aims to, meaningful work for its members and quality bread for its community, albeit in a much more challenging setting.

For the next week we will be donating profits from our sweet bun sales towards the drive; if you want to make your own donation you can pop one in our donation jar or you can also do so on the fundraiser’s website here.