Halloween, Supporting Great Causes & Building Up to COP26

Your Co-op Members App 📱 & Halloween 🎃

I’m delighted to announce that since the successful launch of our Your Co-op Members App on 19^th October, we have now had over 5,100 members start using the app, over 4,500 of whom are new members, this takes the total number of app users to almost 32,000! This wouldn’t have been possible without you, our colleagues across the Society and your work in promoting this wonderful new tool.

Don’t forget that as member colleagues, you can enter the daily prize draw to win £10 off your next shop by simply logging onto the app each day up until 31^st October. You can find out more about the prize draw by clicking here.

In the build-up to Halloween, we’re also giving away a pumpkin in-store when you spend £15, which you can find out more about by visiting the app.

 

Poppy Appeal

As you will have seen, yesterday marked the start of this year’s Poppy Appeal by The Royal British Legion (RBL), which is one of the main charities that the Society supports. It’s great to see that this year’s appeal will return to a more traditional approach, as due to the pandemic RBL representatives were unable to carry out face-to-face collections last year.

I hope you will all join me in paying tribute to those men and women who have served and sacrificed their lives, and those who continue to do so, to defend our nation. Wherever you may be, all our sites and branches will observe the national 2-minute silence occurring at 11am on Thursday 11th and Sunday 14th November.

You can find out more about this year’s Poppy Appeal by clicking here.

 

Movember

Each year people across the globe take part in Movember to get people talking and raise funds for the wonderful men’s health causes they support such as mental health & suicide prevention, prostate cancer, and testicular cancer.

Following one of the newly-formed Men’s Mental Wellbeing group’s meetings, the colleagues raised the importance of Movember to them, as the causes they support are closely aligned with the values of the group.

It’s not too late if you’d like to join the team and get involved, or simply support by donating. Click here to find out more and help make a difference.

 

Half Year Community Pay-outs

I’d also like to take this opportunity to congratulate and thank all of you for your amazing work in fundraising for our 23 Regional Community charity partners and 31 Keep it Local partners over the last 6 months, together you have raised over £42,000, an incredible achievement.

Take a look at some of the thank you messages from the grant recipients we shared earlier this week by clicking here.

 

COP26

Earlier this week Co-operatives UK commissioned research into the climate activity co-ops in the UK, and what support they needed to do more to reduce their carbon emissions, ahead of the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow (31 October - 12 November). This involved a review of the Top 100 co-ops’ climate strategies, as well as an online survey involving a range of small to medium-sized co-ops.  The report, which can be viewed here, reveals the great work that Co-ops are doing to take climate action, and featured our Society’s support of Community Energy across the UK. 

Using this research Co-op UK have been working with ourselves, Co-op Group, Central England Co-op, and Southern Co-op to launch a declaration on behalf of the UK co-op sector, calling for government to demand more of business and provide better support to help all businesses reduce their carbon emissions, as we lead up to COP26. You can read this declaration here.

This is all part of a range of activities we are doing to support COP26, including:

• Engaging our members and colleagues to sign the Fairtrade Foundation’s petition, asking governments to take urgent action against climate change to support Fairtrade farmers and workers.

• Providing advice and opportunities for our members and colleagues to live socially responsible and low carbon lifestyles, and engaging our Young Co-operators to have their say throughout COP26.

• To learn more about the work that we are doing to tackle climate change, please read our Climate Action Report here, that we published earlier in the week.    

It’s been great to see members of our Young Co-operators Network taking such an active role in supporting COP26, with our very own Amelia Crews traveling down to Glasgow this weekend for the conference – find out more here.

 

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