Nantwich Buddies & Nantwich.INFO | Liz Parkin

"Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much."

Join us for as we speak with Liz 'Bizzy Lizzie' Parkin, founder of Nantwich Buddies and Nantwich.INFO. Listen as Liz recounts the story of Nantwich Buddies during those first throws of COVID-19 back in 2020 and how the initiative is still making a difference now. Liz also explains how her new directory website can help you.

Nantwich Buddies: https://www.nantwichbuddies.org/

Nantwich's new directory website: https://www.nantwich.info/ 

If you would like to feature as guest on a future episode of This Place, Our Voices, submit your application via our form: https://bit.ly/podme

"This Place, Our Voices" Credits:

Host: Elyssa Germain
Produced By: OneZeroCreative https://www.onezerocreative.co.uk/

Transcript

We are joined by Liz Parkin. Liz is not only the show manager for Nantwich Show, which we will talk about in more depth on a later episode, but she's also the founder of Nantwich Buddies, a local initiative founded as a direct response to Covid 19, and creator of Nantwich Info, a new comprehensive directory site for all businesses, charities and community organisations in Nantwich and the wider CW5 postcode. Welcome, Liz and thank you for taking time out of your very busy schedule. 

Great to have a chat with you. Thank you for inviting me. 

You must be one of the busiest people I know. Where would you like to start? 

Where would I like to start? Crikey! Well, I suppose my new my new business name is Busy Lizzie. , excuse me, as I've just. I was. I used to be nickname Busy Lizzie when I run Red shift Radio. And I've just relaunched myself now as Busy Lizzie community engagement. So yes, I am Lizzie and yes, I am busy. But hey, that's how I roll. Oh, fantastic. 

So go into Nantwich info. where did the idea for that come from? 

Nantwich Info is a directory listing site for all businesses and community organisations and events in Nantwich. The C W5 postcode as you correctly introduced me as it actually started probably about 12 years ago as in Nantwich, and that was because I was running Red Shift Radio, which was a community radio station. But we were an online station and we were kind of we had a reach nationally, although our main area was just sort of Crewe and Nantwich area. But because I'm new to Nantwich, I've been here 15 years, but obviously I'm still a newbie to dubs. And I love Nantwich. I think natural is a superb town. I love the fact that Nantwich is it's got its own identity. It's a floral market town. It's got a history, it's got community, it's got loads of big, vibrant events. It's got loads going on. It's got a fantastically supportive business network. I know with redshift, I was very well supported as by lots of local businesses and sponsors and things. And so, in Nantwich was my sort of, answer, if you like to, to try to help businesses promote themselves specifically in our local area. it lots of independent traders, they interacted, you know, the shops in Nantwich, all that kind of thing. They interacted well with the site and, over the years, it became more of a Facebook group, and it got up to about 4005 thousand people on there. And then I was about to launch an actual website for it, about three years ago, and was actually then offered a full-time role. So instead of being self-employed and Meade kind of doing all these things myself, I was, employed at Reaseheath college as er, marketing comms manager for about two and a half years. And that took my focus away from being, doing my little things like this. And I also wasn't very proud of the site. I built it in a platform called Wix, and it was very clunky, and I was a little bit like, it's not quite, it's a bit lacklustre. I was a bit I didn't want to show it to anybody. So, it sat there for like two and a half years while I worked in Reaseheath. And then when I left, I saw, right, come on, this is it's now or never. I need to get this Nantwich site going. And I was doing some googling. I, I buy lots of domain names. I mean, I've got all sorts of blooming websites I've built over the years. , and I discovered they had this new one info and it's suddenly occurred to me, actually, Nantwich Info is a really nifty little domain name. And in that sort of bit of research, I also discovered this this organisation called Brilliant Directories, which is an American company. And started looking into that and discovered that actually their platform is incredible, very robust, very comprehensive, lots and lots of, different functionality that you can get as a directory site. So, I undertook, building my version for nantwich.info. I had some help from a really lovely lady in New Zealand. So, she's got a site called Selwyn Connect and, built on the same platform. And so basically been paying her for the last six months to, to do zoom calls with me in the dead of night because obviously there's a 13-hour time difference and she's taught me so much and help me set the site up. So, as you can probably tell, I'm far more excited about it now than I was, all those years ago when it was, you know, a little bit lacklustre and a bit clunky. So, yeah, that's basically where the idea came from. it's very much to help Nantwich shine. Nantwich is a great destination for tourism we have got a fantastic community here of all ages and loads of businesses, loads of independent businesses, small businesses, loads of community groups. And I just wanted to produce a platform that brings them all together. , working with, you know, we've got an amazing community Facebook group, like 20 odd thousand people in there and Karen and her team that manage that at doing a sterling job, we've also got the brilliant Nantwich news and now the Nantwich Life newspaper that Ladens produce. , and I just feel like this is a slightly different thing. This is very much like that portal, if you like to put bring all of that together. All the great stuff about Nantwich, bring it all together in one place. 

So, if you had a business in Nantwich, if you had literally a little shop, a cheese shop or a salon in Nantwich, how would somebody with that shop make the most of Nantwich info? 

Okay, that's a really good question. And in fact, making the most of it is exactly what I've been trying to explain to people, because it's not just about having your name listed there. you can go on and trying to list every business completely for free, if free of charge. Anyone in the CW5 postcode? My big aim. I'm not sure I'll actually get there, but by the end of 2026, I'll have every single business and community group in the CW5 postcode listed on the free platform, on the free the profile and that essentially is the business name, their address and their Google map link. Now obviously they if they're listed on Google, that that's probably similar to what they will get by being by being on Google. , but the way in which businesses and community groups can benefit is to take one of the standard or the premium package, and they're very low price like standard is £9 a month, premium is £14 a month. But with each of them they're different. There's different functionalities. So, you'd go up to have like your logo visible. You could have,reviews from customers, you could have all your links to social media. You could put products on, you could put videos on, you could write articles for the blog that will all feed into the main home page. And so, it's a, you know, it's a way of putting out your, your news as well. , you can put property listings on there if you're any state agents locally would like to go on there. That'd be great .you can put job, job listings on there. Obviously, like stuff like about me, like you, you what you do and opening times and all that kind of thing. But there's it's a very comprehensive site, and you can really put a lot of detail about you as a, as an organisation. And then, of course, that helps you with your SEO and people finding you and backlinks to your site. And then. Depending on what package you take, will come with an amount of social media support as well as, say, support. You will mention you on our pages or that kind of thing. , and then using the Nantwich Info Facebook group, which now has about 5800 people on there, you can then unlimited, unlimited use of that promoting yourself. And that's a very interactive resource. 

I completely agree. I've used the Nantwich Info Facebook group recently, and it's been marked as one of my most successful groups on Facebook to use. Ah, that's good to know. I can definitely, confirm that. , so how does the say you're just a resident of Nantwich? You don't have a business. How does that person make use of that website? 

Okay, so only on their home page. So Nantwich.info takes you to the home page and there's two boxes just below the , header image and one says join as an organisation and one says join as an individual. If you joined as an individual you can set up your membership and then it's completely free. And then you can,put on classified ads. There are certain things that you as an individual can do. you can put on classified ads, you can put on events as well, and you can also go into a profile and you can click the like box so that when you then log in, everyone will have their own login. You will then everybody that you've liked, let's say you've liked the cheese shop in Nantwich and you've liked the shoe shop down the road. And you like, you know, all these different places that would create your feed. So, you'll start to see things from your favourites basically. , my plan is. Two, probably in the next 12 months. Once I've got a decent number of businesses on there, they can release coupons and special offers and QR codes. My plan is to potentially look at doing something like, a membership or a way in which individuals can make use of that and then get, you know, discount or money off things as well. So that's where I'm hoping the households of Nantwich will, will make use of it. 

Are there any offers for new companies joining the website at the moment? 

Yeah, I've got a couple of nice offers really. So, if people want to go on to the premium listing, as I mentioned, it's £14 a month and the standard listing is £9 a month. If you go on to Nantwich info forward slash join, that gives you a detailed list of all the different things that you get for each package. But if you join before the 31st of January, that, that amount will be what you pay for life forever. So, after that 1st of February, I'm going to put the prices up. So that's effectively at the moment a half price introductory offer. So, I'm really hoping we can get, you know, a really good proportion of, of the community signed up by the end of January and then forever. They'll only ever have to pay that amount. 

That’s a really generous deal. 

Hopefully people enjoy that. 

So, a lot of hard work has gone into that site, and it doesn't surprise me because it seems like whatever you get your mindset to, you put 110% into. And one of the things that since I've been discussing this podcast that we're doing now with you, the one thing I found out about Nantwich Buddies that's such an amazing initiative that you started during Covid. Please do tell me more about it. 

Nantwich Buddies was an accident. I think referred to Red Shift Radio as an accident. And my goodness me, I'm good at having these big, crazy, mad ideas. Nantwich buddies I remember the first day of lockdown, 23rd of March, when we were all a bit like, oh my word, what's going to happen? That really strange feeling. And my husband MJ came home. He works next door to Welches on Hospital Street. He came home with this big pile of cheese and Welch's. The boys at Welch's, Stuart and Roger had vacuum packed all this cheese for him into Porsche and what not important, but like a weekly dose, just in case they had to, like, shut up shop. And he wasn't going to get any cheese for lockdown. So, while he had a mountain of cheese and Mrs. Dan's chutney on the side, plus he's like, oh yeah, and Roger's given me this because this is short life date, a short expiry date and stuff. I'm like, right, okay. That's important. And then it got me thinking, we were doing all this talk about people that were needing to isolate and keep away from this dreadful thing called Covid. And I thought on my word, if my grandpa was still alive down in South Wales. He wouldn't have. He's got friends down there. But you got any immediate family down there who would go and do his shopping? So, I put a message out on Facebook, and I said, look, I'm just going to set up this little group, or I'm going to do some shopping for people. Does anybody want to help? And within a fortnight I had 40 people all come forward to volunteer. And there are a lot of them. They were people from like at the time, I was a member of my rotary group, and some of them were red shift radio volunteers that stepped forward. They were friends, all sorts of different friends. Anybody that I knew on Facebook, really. So that's where it all started and we went shopping for people and prescription collecting. That was the main two things that we did. And then obviously things evolved and we ended up, we thought, well, I thought we'd only be doing it like for that initial three months lockdown, but because Cheshire East caught wind of it and they set up a group called People Helping People, and we became known as a VCP, which is a volunteer coordination point for the CDB five, Nantwich and rural postcode area. And there are other groups set up in Wollaston and Whiston and Crewe and did it there. But we were this area So people helping people, then started to send us people that needed support. And yeah, that's basically how it started. It's scary to think of how many people have suffered. Had you not had the idea at that time? It was a very isolating, literally time for us all. Yeah so it's very, very commendable. Were there any challenges that you experienced during Covid with that? Because that sounded very easy to set up, very easy to just pull together. Well, it I'm a big believer in keeping it simple. And it was and we were able to keep it simple. And because of that response to Covid, you know, it was like, oh my goodness me, we need to crack on here and we need to support people now. So, all we did was we had a WhatsApp group. We had , the inquiries were coming in through people knowing us and through social media. All they were coming in through Cheshire East, and they were sending us the name and address of people that needed help. And then I was just farming it out to this group of volunteers, and they would go, yeah, I can help with that. Yet they live down my road. Yeah, I'll take that one on, do it. So that was very simple. And actually, I would say it was in some respects it was easier in lockdown than it is now because. Now we make sure that all of our volunteers are DBS checked. Police checked. Now we have a very comprehensive vetting procedure and onboarding procedure. And Sarah a volunteer coordinator and has been since I started my full-time role really at Reaseheath. So, April 21st, she's been started as a volunteer and then went on to be our, volunteer coordinator. She's got an incredible system if you like to onboard people. , and latterly now we've got Amberly also working with us to, to support that role. , but yeah, it was probably easier then because we literally just said, well, yeah, if you want to help and come on, crack on, let's, let's get going. Whereas now we are a bit more careful about who we how we vet people and, and whatnot. 

This seems like a really silly question to ask now, looking back at Covid, but how well received was what you did with Nantwich bodies during Covid? 

It was very, very well received. I'm probably only realising that now. we were asked by Cheshire East to keep going after the first lockdown when other people were kind of closing their coordination points down and going back to work. So, we were given an initial grant to employ Sarah to carry on as our volunteer coordinator in a paid role, because it was. So useful. And but we didn't we didn't shout about it at all. We just got on and did it. And it's only probably now in the last, maybe even in the last year or two years, that we’ve because we've built some really strong relationships. We call them clients the people that we support, there are some of our buddies supporting people still that were there right from the very first week of lockdown. You know, it might have started that they needed a bit of shopping because they were avoiding Covid, but now it's gone on. That husband or wife's gone into hospital, somebody died. The daughter and the son don't live nearby, so they can't do the shopping. They might have developed dementia. And we've you know, there's things that we've seen and, and, and some of our buddies who have been around for the four years, four and a half years have been incredible hand holders and friends to the clients that we've been supporting. And we've been I mean, the things I've seen and the people I've met and the things I've heard about through our volunteers, about how some people live their lives and they're just so less fortunate than I am. It's absolutely heartbreaking to know that some people really, really do not have anybody in their lives to help them. , and somebody some people are so poorly or have so challenges that, that stop them from going out and living the sort of life that, you know, I'm lucky to be able to live and so that's, you know, that's why we do it. So safe to say that despite us now not being in Covid, Nantwich bodies is as important now as it was then. Definitely. Yeah, I didn't again, I didn't realise it probably. I probably realised it in more so in the last couple of weeks where a few of our clients had really needed some help, and I've actually had a chat with some of our buddies and found out the depth of what they're doing for these people. , you know, we, we help people, all sorts of things from running them around to hospital appointments, to setting them up on online shopping to help them manage their shopping better, we've helped short-term taking dogs for walks when people come out of hospital, and they can't do that. , one gentleman I've helped came out. He said 12 weeks in hospital, came out, and he was in a right old pickle with all his finances because everything was, he paid as he went kind of thing. Didn't have any direct debit set up. So of course, he got into a real state, and I spent a lot of time kind of trying to help him. So, you know, there's a huge amount of trust put on us as buddies. , but we take people all over the place. We now run some social groups as well. So instead of offering purely 1 to 1 befriending, we encourage people to come along to our coffee and company, which is on a Wednesday morning in Nantwich and Coffee Company on a Wednesday afternoon in memory. , and yeah, it's. It's very apparent that we're still very much needed. And instead of I think in the height of lockdown, we got up to about 120 volunteers. We're now down to about 40 regulars that are there doing something week in, week out. , and some people are communicating with their clients almost daily on the phone and stuff. So, we've got some really, really special, special people in our team. 

Are you looking for more volunteers or is 40 the most? 

No, no, no, we're always looking for more. We're particularly looking for volunteer drivers. We run a transport service that we keep kind of under the radar, because it's very much for medical appointments only, and we are the last stop. We are the last. If you've got nobody, then we will take you to Leighton Hospital or we will take you to you have your hearing test or have you Covid jab over at West Street. And we try to make sure Sara runs that arm of the organisation. Now we try to make sure that, you know, we know that these people don't have anybody, or they don't have the means to necessarily afford a regular taxi or. , yeah, they, they want the security knowing somebody that they can probably see each time they go for their appointment. So, we've got about six volunteer drivers who are completely maxed out. We can't keep up with it. , so we would definitely like some more volunteer drivers. But to be honest, we've we can always place the more bodies that we have, the more people we can support. So yeah, absolutely welcome anybody with open arms. If there's anyone listening to this now that really wants to get involved, how would they do that. Best thing to do is drop us an email info at Nantwich Buddies. Org. If you go on to the website, then there's also a phone number, their landline phone number there. 01270 440750 and that's a call handling service. So, you can put your details on there. And then we can call you back and you'll hear from you're likely to hear from Amberly. , and if it's an inquiry about transport you'll hear from Sara.  and if both of them are busy, then I pick up what we need to as well. And there's also a little video on there that we had made last year. , that gives you a bit of an overview as to what buddies is all about as well, and the coffee mornings that you mentioned before. 

I've seen a couple of other coffee mornings outside of the ones you've already mentioned. I don't know how you get time to do all of this, but what are the other ones that people can go to and take advantage of? 

Well, the coffee, the coffee in company is one that's been running for a good few years now over at the civic. That's mainly sort of older people that go to that one. , that's 1130 till 11 till 130 at 1230. Sorry. At the Civic Hall. , the one that we've set up in memory is Coffee and company. Memory from the uniquely named is for anybody. We literally. There's no. We've had a real mixture of ages there the other day. It was lovely from two till four. , we just. You buy a cup of coffee, sit down. We have a chat. We've also launched menopause and mojitos because that was a group that well, mainly because I had an emergency hysterectomy back in April and suddenly was thrown into a medical menopause. , and I thought, oh, there's this experience that I didn't know I was going to have so, quite so suddenly. So, I thought, oh, must be a support group for that. And there wasn't. So, we set that up. , we're also we have in the past run something called the Happiness Hub, which was a lovely group. We had funding to run that for six months. We managed to eek it out to about nine months, actually, but I would really like to relaunch that. , and also, we're going to launch a new to Nantwich group. , a lot of people that came to the Happiness Hub were people that were literally that they were new to Nantwich. They didn't know what was going on in the area. And so, we're going to relaunch that one probably in the new year. We've got somebody working on the a men's mental health group. And then the last one that I'm looking at setting up, which I'd like to get a few more people involved with it before set it up. , because it's not really one that I can run week in, week out myself. , is a creative arts and crafts thing, so people can just come bring your knitting, bring your weaving, bring your bit of sketching, whatever it is you want. And we'll have the speakers, and we've got lots of artists locally that have all said, yeah, will come and do an activity, but that creative. I'm a big believer that being creative and being outdoors are probably the two main things that can massively help your mental health. No matter who you are. , and that's definitely us. That's what's always helped me. And so, I'd like to just get a little regular group going in lunch, which around those as well. 

Thank you so much for your time today. Just as a last word, what advice would you give somebody who's now moved to Nantwich, who has started listening to this podcast and thinks, wow, what a place. 

Right. Well, I would say what I did when I first moved here not knowing anybody. And I remember thinking at the time, I'm single, I'm self-employed, how am I going to get to know people? Is volunteer join a volunteer organisation? My years of running Red Shift Radio. I did a I did a little sort of recce on our volunteers. , after about eight years, and it was something like 80% of our volunteers were from outside of the area. They're all new looking to kind of make friends or get to know their area. And I think the same can be said probably for Nantwich buddies as well. , there's a lot of people and there's a lot of fantastic organisations that that rely on volunteers. Nantwich in bloom, the food bank, Nantwich litter picking, you know, all lovely, lovely groups. And not only are they doing something good, but you will make friends and give yourself a purpose and get to know your community. 

Great. Thank you so very much. 

Thank you.