By Rebecca Carter, Recruitment & Marketing Executive for Beanstalk East Midlands

It’s been a busy start to 2016 for everyone in the East Midland’s team, with lots of new faces (and sad goodbyes) in the area. Greg Yarnall, who was Area Manager for the East Midlands area, has moved onto pastures new, and we’ve got several new team members to help us achieve our goals for the year. It’s certainly going to be all hands on deck for everything that we have planned over the coming months!

The Get Luton Reading campaign, which we launched in September of last year, is going from strength to strength. We are delighted to announce that we have a new link with Luton Council, which will help us push for more fantastic reading helpers in the area.

In Bedford, we now have a link with a local bookshop who will be providing a local place for our Bedford volunteers to meet up and swap their books.

Our work in Milton Keynes and Northamptonshire is continuing to flourish, with members of the local community showing a lot of interest in becoming trained reading helpers. Excitingly, we have also got author of best-selling crime fiction Leigh Russell on board after meeting her at Bedford International Writing Competition!

The Mayor of Corby also recently visited one of partner schools, to meet a Beanstalk reading helper and find out more about what they do in their reading sessions. We also have a wide range of recruitment activities planned so we can meet more people interested in changing a life through one-to-one literacy support.

Just last week, a local library also very kindly donated us over 1,000 books! 

We also have some exciting events coming up. On Thursday 17^th March, we have a big event in Luton shopping centre called ‘Our Space’ so why not come down and meet us! We also have some speaking events coming up at Quinton Women’s Institute and Rothwell Ladies Club.  

Lastly and of course, most importantly, as a team we have been doing a Beanstalk Bake-Off where we take it in turns to bake a cake each week and score each other. You can see lots of pictures on @EMBeanstalk our Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood inspired creations. Yum!

If you'd like to become a trained reading helper in the East Midlands, then please do get in touch with our Northampton Office.