With our Fife group now hosting regular meetings, an Edinburgh volunteer meet-up was long overdue. As a result, our new volunteer Vesalina set to work arranging a date for supporters to come together and talk about ways in which they’d like to help us. The gathering was held in our Montrose Terrace office and allowed our volunteers to get to know one another and hear a little about how our campaigns were coming along. Here’s what we covered at our volunteer Edinburgh group meeting in May …
Update on OneKind Campaigns
We kicked our meeting off with some key figures and updates on our recent campaigns:
- Ban Farm Cages (New Campaign): We’ve already received 3,600 signatures for this campaign to ban enriched cages for egg-laying hens & farrowing crates for sows. Our volunteers have asked us to look into a new development that includes crates with moving walls. We are now investigating this further with a volunteer who has extra knowledge of these new crates.
- Salmon Farming: Our initial proposal was rejected, so our next step is to grow our signature list to encourage campaign attention. Our petition calling for a moratorium on the expansion of salmon farming is now on 5,724.
- Mountain Hare: This has been a huge campaign for us, reaching a record petition number of 17,591! We really hope to get this to 20,000 before we hand it over to the Scottish Government in the next few months.
- Fox Hunting: We are now waiting for the Scottish Government to consult on recommendations to reduce the pack size to 2 dogs. Green MSP Alison Johntson is also still working on her bill to ban fox hunting. Our volunteers asked us if there are any land owners currently actively supporting our campaign. There are none that we know of.
- Snares: We have a snares report coming out in the next few months to push for a complete ban on sale, use and manufacture of snares in Scotland. We have asked that anyone who sees a snare report it to use (with photos if possible) or to the SnareWatch website – www.snarewatch.com.
Think you can help us bulk up our signatures for any of these campaigns? We now send out campaign signature packs for people to share with work collegues/family members and friends. Ask our campaigns officer for one today by clicking here.
Group volunteering Edinburgh
Our OneKind volunteer Facebook group size has doubled in the last year, an amazing response to local volunteer activity! We now have a reliable team of social media volunteers helping us run our Instagram account, alongside a positive park clean-up organiser and strong fundraising relationship with Leith Plant Swap! On top of this, we have a few Edinburgh events coming up very shortly …
- OneKind stall at the Edinburgh pride Festival – Saturday 22nd June
- Edinburgh Plant Swap Fundraiser at Leith Police Box – Sunday 21st July
Since our meeting, we are also chasing some leads on new event ideas put forward by our volunteers. More info to come on this as it develops …
Volunteering Opportunities Edinburgh
- We are really keen to hear from volunteers willing to host small fundraiser events and can help do all the organisation work to get this in place.
- We are still looking for a volunteer with experience of Canva who can help us to build some social media memes when required.
- With a number of our volunteers preparing talks to support OneKind campaigns, we are now looking for volunteers who may have contacts with venues who may let us host events for free.
- Our Fundraiser Lauren recently popped up a small survey asking if people would be willing to get involved in a charity Zip-slide across the Clyde for OneKind. We have 10 spaces to fill, which were booked after a positive response to the event in August. We’d love to see all 10 places filled, more details can be found here.
We’d like to say a huge thanks to everyone who made it along to our first Edinburgh meeting in over a year. A wonderful turn out and some promising ideas put forward. The group agreed to meet again in August. Dates to be confirmed soon!
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