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Thank-you cards in eleven languages: our volunteer card-making night
How our Bristol volunteers spent an evening making handmade thank-you cards for everyone who helped this year, in all the languages spoken on our streets.
Every November I try to find a way to say thank you to everyone who turned up this year: the litter pickers, the coat swap sorters, the people who lent us a gazebo and never asked for it back. This year we skipped the shop-bought cards and made our own, and it turned into one of my favourite evenings of the whole year.
The set-up
We borrowed the back room of the community centre for two hours on a Tuesday. A neighbour who does block printing brought carved rubber stamps, and everyone else brought whatever they had: coloured card, washi tape, old seed packets, pressed leaves from the autumn clean-up. Total spend was under twenty pounds, mostly on envelopes and glue sticks.
- Fold the card first, decorate second. We learned that one the hard way.
- Keep one table for glue and glitter and one table strictly for writing.
- Put the kettle on before anyone arrives, not after.
Thank you, in every language on our street
Our neighbourhood speaks a lot of languages, so instead of printing one message we asked everyone to write thank you in their own. By the end of the night we had cards in English, Somali, Polish, Urdu, Spanish, Japanese, Arabic, Portuguese, Welsh, Tamil and Igbo. My mum checked my Igbo over the phone, twice. The illustration at the top is the one we put on the invite, and it pretty much sums up the mood.
One of our original litter pickers moved to Norway in the summer and still sent a card back to the group, with a photo of the view from her new weekend hike. We also tucked in a picture of the last squash from the community garden plot, because it deserved a thank-you too.
If you coordinate volunteers anywhere, I can't recommend this enough. It costs almost nothing, it gets people chatting who normally only see each other in hi-vis, and the cards end up on fridges for months. Happy to share the stamp designs if anyone wants them, just ask in the comments.
Comments (4)
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Jane, this is lovely. Caregivers Connect has been looking for a December activity that isn't another video call, and a card evening might be exactly right for our group.
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Question for you: I saw your mum checked your Igbo, but how did you check everyone else's? Some of our members write in languages I can't read at all, and I'd hate for someone to receive a card with an accidentally odd phrase in it.
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Also, did people sign their own names, or did you keep the cards anonymous?
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Answering my own question after talking it over with our moderators: for a health support space we're going to keep the cards anonymous, or first names only. A few ground rules we agreed on, in case they help anyone running something similar:
- No full names, addresses or anything else that could identify the sender or the person receiving the card.
- Nothing about anyone's diagnosis, treatment or appointments. Keep the messages warm and general.
- Taking part is optional, and so is receiving a card. Some people would rather not, and that's fine.
- Cards go out by post from the group, not handed over at the clinic, so nobody is singled out in a waiting room.
- If someone is struggling, a card is not the place to deal with it. Point them to their own care team or local urgent services.
Thanks for the idea, Jane. I'll report back on how it goes.
