ROSIE NEEDS YOUR VOTE

 Our very own Rosie Catherwood is on the national shortlist of three finalists for the Plunkett organisation’s Community Contribution award!  We all know how much Rosie does in the shop and around the village. Now it’s up to us to make her the winner by voting for her on this link – and getting all your friends and family to vote for her too.

We are a small village. Rosie’s rivals may have a bigger community to draw on, so let’s cast the net as wide as we can. 

The award is one of several run by Plunkett, an organisation which promotes rural business.  Amazingly, Rosie is not just a finalist herself but her submissions on behalf of Semley Village Stores in two other categories, the Nina Foskett Award for Team Spirit and the Investing in Local People award are also finalists in their categories.  

But the only one decided by public vote - YOUR VOTE - is the Community Contribution award. As I say, we all know how much Rosie does – so it would be great to get her national recognition. 

This is what we said in our testimonial to the judging committee: 

“Rosie is irreplaceable. On paper, she is secretary to our shop committee but she does much more than take notes and write minutes. She manages the weekly rota, cajoling volunteers to see they have time to do just a little more in the shop than they thought.   She uses her background in finance to think creatively about how the shop is managed – she spotted that HMRC now accepts that volunteer hours can be set against tax – and of course when she is on shift the shop is full of chat and laughter. But perhaps the biggest thing she does is engage with the young people in the village, encouraging some to do their Duke of Edinburgh volunteering in the shop and others simply to learn some skills that will be helpful in the future. Under her mentoring, she helps the shy and anxious become confident, competent and valuable helpers. She introduced the paid-teenager scheme which gives them some pocket money and the shop a pool of labour for hard-to-fill shifts. As one young person she helped says, “she created a safe space for me to learn how to grow .. . she has become not just a mentor, she is also a friend.” Anyone who has watched her putting together our entry for the Investing in People award will understand what passion and energy she brings to the shop – and the same gifts are applied to many other community projects, from the fete to the book club and the coronation picnic.”

VOTE ROSIE!  BY JUNE 13TH

Coming soon: Rosie, the biopic!