cotteridge park

Volunteering at Cotteridge Park

When we decided to support the Friends of Cotteridge Park we were interested in doing three things. Firstly, we took donations through our website and at the counter. You gave a total of £576, which will go towards keeping activities in the park free to access for everyone in the community.

Secondly, we wanted to help promote the park to our few thousand customers and newsletter readers. Hopefully you’ve been inspired to go along to an event for the first time, or just use the park more often.

Thirdly — and most importantly — we wanted to encourage you to give your time. The park is run by volunteers and many hands make lighter work. To this end Dorit has written about her time working as a volunteer at The Shed. We’ve also asked Emma, chair of the Friends, to outline all the ways you might get involved.

What it means to volunteer at The Shed

Before joining Loaf, Dorit volunteered at The Shed, the café and community hub in Cotteridge Park. We asked her to talk about why she got involved and what she got out of the experience.

Having moved to Birmingham from Germany during a pandemic I barely saw any actual English people for the first six months of living here. My social life only began in April 2021 at a SwingFit session in Cotteridge Park. I‘d never seen so many English speaking people in once place and it was quite overwhelming after so many months.

I moved here with my husband in late 2020 and took online courses in the language since my English school lessons were far too long ago. But, oh dear, there are worlds between Brummie English and what I have learned!

After the SwingFit session with many lovely people, we got a tea and I saw the sign ‘Volunteers needed’. I had a brief talk with Emma about what it meant to be a volunteer and started helping for a few hours once a week.

Since I used to work in a shop back home, it seemed best for me to volunteer in The Shed, the community building where people can have a coffee, eat some cake or just sit down for a while and enjoy the park.

If working in The Shed isn‘t your thing, there are many more ways to get involved. Volunteers do gardening activities, organise the CoCoMAD festival or help at the forest school. They also need people to take care of their website, social media, marketing, help with accounts and finances … Everything helps. How about doing some laundry from the café or picking up litter? Or maybe you have some skills to share with other volunteers, like knitting.

There are always new things to try at Cotteridge Park, such as drawing, bike polo, woodcarving… All of these and much more wouldn‘t be possible without those highly engaged volunteers.

I felt like I‘ve got something back every time I worked my shifts, and the gratitude of the visitors and the other volunteers was very encouraging. I‘m sure volunteering at The Shed helped me a lot when I applied for my job at Loaf as it was my only work experience in UK.

I quickly made many new friends and was made very welcome in this new community. When my flight home to Germany was cancelled due to Covid I spent Christmas with friends I’d made at The Shed.

Now I work full time at Loaf, I haven’t have the time to volunteer as much. But my husband and I are moving closer to the park, which feels like home to me, so I hope to be able to volunteer again. It’s where I started becoming a Brummie, after all!

Watch this lovely video about The Shed and the people who volunteer there

How to volunteer your time in Cotteridge Park

by Emma Woolf, chair of the board of trustees.

Cotteridge Park has been benefiting from the love and time given by volunteers since it was saved from closure by and for the community in 1997. The volunteers are the most amazing bunch of kind and generous people without whom the park would be a much lesser place.

Whatever you are interested in, and however much (or little) time you can give, there is always a way for you to help out. Here are 10 ideas to start you off, but we’re open to all suggestions.

Join The Shed volunteers — like Dorit did
Join the gardeners who meet on Tuesdays at 10 and Sundays at 10.15 (from mid September — currently on their summer break)
Help plan and run events — such as CoCoMAD or the film screenings
Help raise funds — by running events or writing funding applications
Help maintain the website and social media
Join the trustees to help with the legal and financial stuff
Share a skill — the Bike Polo, Knit and Natter, and the Art Group are run by people with skills to share
Create merchandise that could be sold to benefit the park
Help find technical and sustainable solutions to make the park a better place for people and nature
Or just pick up any litter you find when you walk round the park — litter picker and bin bags available.

We find volunteers get as much, if not more, than they give and find the experience rewarding in many ways. If this sounds like something you’d like to try, pop down to The Shed for a chat or fill in the volunteer form on the website.

Thank you!

Cotteridge Park is charity of the quarter… again!

The last couple of months have been really busy at Loaf and we weren’t able to properly support and promote our nominated charity, Friends of Cotteridge Park. So we’re going to keep them on through to the summer and the annual CoCoMad festival.

You can continue to give donations with your pre-orders and at the counter in store. And as spring turns into summer we’ll be drawing your attention to the many things going on in the park and how you can get involved.

What’s on at Cotteridge Park?

This quarter we’re raising money for Friends of Cotteridge Park. FoCP puts on a wide range of events throughout the year which are free to all, ensuring no one in our community is excluded from trying something new that might improve their physical or mental wellbeing.

Here’s the current weekly calendar.

While volunteers go a long way to keeping things free, there are inevitable financial costs – which is where you can help, either by donating when you buy at Loaf or through their JustGiving page.

Introducing Friends of Cotteridge Park

If you live in or near Stirchley, you’ll doubtless be aware of Cotteridge Park, one of the many green gems of suburban Birmingham. But unlike most of our neighbourhood parks, Cotteridge is run by volunteers since being saved by local people from closure in 1997.

Friends of Cotteridge Park is the charitable organisation that runs all the activities and co-ordinates volunteer work at the park, including an annual festival and the new Shed cafe hub.

We asked them to write a bit about what they do:

The volunteers at Cotteridge Park are passionate about our little park in the heart of our community. The Friends of Cotteridge Park work tirelessly to improve the park’s infrastructure, and to provide services and activities that meet the needs of local people.
In any given week you’ll find Tai Chi, arts courses, youth workers, gardening, conservation and walking groups, and much more. The Shed opened in 2020 and is the hub for our activities and a friendly place to grab a cup of coffee too.
Oh, and then there’s CoCoMAD – the best little festival in Birmingham, where we celebrate Music, art, dance and science from our community and beyond.
In order to provide all this, and more, we are constantly fundraising. We have a principle that all our activities are free at the point of delivery so no one is excluded because they can’t afford to attend. This means we need donations to keep us going. We’re truly grateful for anything you can give to support our work.
And if you can give your time – even if it’s just an hour – you would be welcomed with open arms.
Contact us at: info@cotteridgepark.org.uk / www.cotteridgepark.org.uk. And we’re on facebook, twitter and instagram

You can donate with your online orders or at the counter. And over the Spring we’ll be featuring a few of the things you might want to get involved with yourself.

CoCoMAD going ahead tomorrow – get down and support it!

This just in from the from the Friends of Cotteridge Park about Birmingham’s best little festival, CoCoMAD:

CoCoMAD is going ahead tomorrow regardless – can’t cancel, won’t cancel…
Music, stalls, procession, lovely, lovely hot food and drinks all going ahead.
Wear your wellies & waterproofs and bring something plastic to sit on for the true festival experience – it there’s no Glastonbury, come to Cotteridge Park for your mud.
Bring your Dunkirk spirit and support all the traders, performers, trolley builders and volunteers who have worked so hard all year.
And not wanting to tempt fate the weather is looking better for tomorrow…
Join the trolley procession, leaving from the Friends’ Meeting House Watford Rd in Cotteridge at 12noon – on foot or on your bicycle.
The first band goes on stage and the stalls & activities start at 12.30
Hooray for CoCoMAD and the lovely waterproof people of Cotteridge

CoCoMAD going ahead tomorrow – get down and support it!

This just in from the from the Friends of Cotteridge Park about Birmingham’s best little festival, CoCoMAD:

CoCoMAD is going ahead tomorrow regardless – can’t cancel, won’t cancel…
Music, stalls, procession, lovely, lovely hot food and drinks all going ahead.
Wear your wellies & waterproofs and bring something plastic to sit on for the true festival experience – it there’s no Glastonbury, come to Cotteridge Park for your mud.
Bring your Dunkirk spirit and support all the traders, performers, trolley builders and volunteers who have worked so hard all year.
And not wanting to tempt fate the weather is looking better for tomorrow…
Join the trolley procession, leaving from the Friends’ Meeting House Watford Rd in Cotteridge at 12noon – on foot or on your bicycle.
The first band goes on stage and the stalls & activities start at 12.30
Hooray for CoCoMAD and the lovely waterproof people of Cotteridge

CoCoMAD Preview – 3rd July 2010

This Saturday, one of Birmingham’s best community events is taking place right on our doorstep in the small but perfectly formed Cotteridge Park, about 200 yds from Loaf HQ! It’s a fun, family friendly, free festival of music and arts, that attracts around 5000 people annually, and is now in its 13th year! You can find a full programme on the Friends of Cotteridge Park website, but highlights include Misty’s Big Adventure on the main stage, green wood working and bushcraft in the Community Orchard, and a 6m climbing wall.

Festival food is also a highlight this year with local deli and cafe Leverton and Halls bringing lovely organic burgers and other delights, friend-of-Loaf Sajida providing gorgeous authentic curries, and us debuting our brand new mobile wood-fired pizza oven, and selling Cotteridge Park elderflower cordial too. We’re keeping it simple for the debut with two pizza’s on the menu, both made with a sourdough pizza base and our secret tomato sauce – organic Gloucestershire ham and mushroom with West Country mature cheddar, or red onion, black olive and basil. Come and watch your pizza being made and cooked in front of your eyes, hopefully all in 2 minutes flat.