Seven weeks of volunteer Thursdays at The Warren, and this week raised a question that I think is probably quite important to share outside of the people in the room too. What exactly are our volunteers volunteering for?
For the first six weeks that was fairly easy to answer. The Warren had been closed for nearly a year and we were trying to bring an empty building back to life. People came in and painted, cleaned, fixed things, moved furniture, sorted cupboards, worked in the garden and did hundreds of little jobs that eventually helped us get the doors open again. Now we're open. We're serving Sunday lunch again. Friday and Saturday evenings have started. We have paid staff back in the building and we're working to make The Warren financially sustainable again. And that changes things.
Over lunch on Thursday we had a pretty big conversation about where volunteering ends and the commercial restaurant begins. Because if a volunteer cleans a table that a paying customer is going to sit at tomorrow, they're helping the restaurant. If someone sorts stock or helps get the building ready for service, they're helping the restaurant. If somebody with the right food hygiene training helps us make something that's eventually going to be served to a customer, they're helping the restaurant. There's no point pretending otherwise. And actually I'm comfortable saying that.
Right now The Warren needs help. We're a tiny independent restaurant getting back onto our feet after being closed for nearly a year. We're paying everyone who works here the same hourly wage, above the Real Living Wage. We are buying from lots of small local farms, growers and producers. We're making food properly and keeping as much money as we can moving around our local economy. Doing things this way isn't the cheapest or easiest way of running a restaurant. That's kind of the point. So if someone wants to give a few hours of their time to help The Warren survive and get back onto its feet, that's amazing. And I'm incredibly grateful for it. But Thursday's conversation made me realise that we need to be much clearer about that.
Because there's another part to all of this too. I don't just want The Warren to be a restaurant that's closed four days a week. We've got a kitchen. We've got a bar. We've got tables and chairs and a building in the middle of Carmarthen. We've got relationships with farmers, growers, cooks and loads of brilliant people doing interesting things around food. What else can we do with all of that? That's where the community side of The Warren comes in.
We've stopped accepting tips and instead we're asking people who would have tipped us to consider donating to our Community Fund. The idea is that money can help us do things beyond the normal commercial work of the restaurant. Community meals, workshops, preserving, cooking, training, food skills, bulk buying, food resilience, working with local growers, sharing knowledge, using surplus food, bringing people together around food. We don't know exactly what all of that looks like yet. And I think that's okay.
That's actually where Thursday got interesting. One of our new volunteers, Kim, suggested that we make the Community Fund much more visible. Not just a QR code asking people for money. A wall in the restaurant showing how much we've raised, what we've spent, what we're currently raising towards and what actually happened because people contributed. Somewhere people can suggest ideas too. Maybe even vote on what they'd like to see happen next. It seems incredibly obvious now she's said it. If we're asking people to contribute towards something, they should be able to see exactly what they're contributing towards. So we're going to build it.
We're also going to start running a monthly Thursday evening fundraiser. It might be a quiz one month, food another month, games, workshops, a party or something we haven't thought of yet. And rather than saying come and help us raise money for the Community Fund, I'd like us to be able to say something much more tangible. We're trying to raise £500 to make this happen. Then afterwards we can show people what happened.
We're changing the volunteer days a little too. From next week they'll run from 9am until 3pm, with lunch together in the middle. You don't have to come for six hours. Come for an hour, a morning, lunch or the whole thing. We're also going to be clearer about what the jobs actually are. Some things will simply be helping The Warren. Some will be community projects. Some will be learning something, making something, fixing something or looking after this old building. And people can choose what they want to be involved with. I think that's important.
Thursday's conversation challenged some of my thinking. I got defensive at points. I'm passionate about this place and sometimes when you've got a very clear picture in your own head of where you're trying to get to, it's easy to forget that nobody else can actually see it. But I don't want to build something where people are frightened to question what we're doing. I don't have all the answers, and I don't think pretending I do would make The Warren any stronger.
What I do have is a pretty strong belief that a restaurant can be more useful than simply somewhere people come to eat. The commercial side matters. It has to. If the restaurant doesn't make enough money to pay its staff, suppliers, bills and eventually me, none of the rest of this works. But if we can get that bit working, then I think there's a really interesting question about what else a restaurant, its kitchen, its building and the community around it can be used for.
That's the experiment we're running at The Warren at the moment. And if you're reading this and you've got an idea for something we could do here, something you'd like to learn, something you could teach, something involving food, farming, growing, preserving, sustainability or resilience, tell us. You might have a much better idea than the ones currently floating around in my head.
That's kind of the point.
Week 7. Still learning what we're building.
