A Letter from Frit: Bridging Gaps.

Hey folks,

Welcome to August, welcome to Leo season, welcome to Summer.

As of 14th August, the Daily Kitchen cafe will have been open for 6 months, which feels like a pretty big milestone. The studio upstairs will have been open for 7 months, and the regulars who attend the classes are forming a community.

Since Open House began, we’ve expanded from Andre, Ab, Pippa and Regine to a team of 30+, including the cleaning and maintenance team. We’ve served hundreds of meals, taken 4500+ bookings for our classes and workshops, and welcomed many four-legged friends. It has been both a brilliant and challenging period for many, if not all, of us.

This update is an experiment to see if this might be a good way to communicate news across the team. We know that communication has been at the root of many issues at Open House, and so this could be a way in which we try to fill in some gaps, alongside the fortnightly meetings that Naomi and Sam are leading, and the debriefs at the end of each shift.

Perhaps a good way to kick off this first edition is to outline the three pillars/missions that Open House was set up with, in case it might serve as a good reminder for some, or if anyone hasn’t had a chance to discover them. The pillars are:

• People - are we creating space for community and connection?

• Good business - are we financially sustainable?

• Planet - are we in balance with the planet?

Ultimately, we’re trying to do things differently, especially business.

There’s a certain way that a lot of hospitality or service-related businesses operate, or believe that they should operate, and we often see or experience the pitfalls of that: fat pockets of the C-suite whilst the staff burnout, low team morale and dismal staff retention.

For me, I’ve always been drawn to the intention here that we don’t have to, and actually shouldn’t, follow suit (goodbye, First Mountain) and the more rules and boundaries we can break, the better. I’ve been enveloped by burnout too many times, and I’m over it.

But it’s all an experiment. None of us have done this before. And so we’re all flying by the seat of our pants, learning how to do business like this whilst also learning how to work together, with all the emotions that that can bring. And I both love that, and find it really challenging - I think that’s natural, both can exist at the same time.

So my hope with this update is that it can help to bridge some communication gaps; not just from someone like me and not just about business-related topics, but also from anyone in the team generally. So if there’s anything you’d like to share, from the seemingly trivial to substantial, then do let me know.

Finally, be sure to check out some upcoming events that folks in the team are up to in the coming weeks. And if you have any feedback or questions about this update, feel free to chat to me about it, or message me.

Big love,

Frit

Team News!

NINA.

Nina will be on a Catamaran boat trip traveling around Corfu for a week wearing a pair of goggles, bands, tablets and patches all for travel sickness from 17th August.

KATE.

Kate will be in Portugal for 2 weeks on a creative’s homestay, if the person’s apartment she’s staying in ever gets back to her ...

NAOMI.

Naomi will be having the time of her life at Medicine festival, covered in glitter, doing some soul searching on the weekend of 15-19th August.

AB & PIP.

Ab and Pip will be travelling around Australia for the next several weeks, staying in a campervan for part of their trip and hopefully spotting a platypus or two on their travels.

FRIT.

Frit became the director of Sheffield Adventure Film Festival this year, and will be holding his first event on 7th September with two programs of films: a Mental Health programme (in honour of World Suicide Prevention Day) and a Made In Sheffield programme filled with films by Sheffield-based filmmakers and adventurers.

SAM.

Sam is currently aiming to swim 1km (40 laps of the pool) in 15 mins. He’s already hit 17 mins, but the clock at Chatsworth pool gaslit him for a while and kept telling him 20 mins.

DONNA.

When asked about whether she had any news she’d like to share, she replied with “No, I’m really dull”.

REGINE.

When asked about any news she had to share, she replied with “I don’t have news, I only have words of wisdom. It’s all I’ve got.”

ANDRE.

Andre has gotten back on his motorbike after a 25 year break and is now loving it, and feels like he’s riding better than he did 25 years ago.