The coronavirus pandemic has had a big impact on tea parties over the past two years, and we know that you’ve been working hard to support your guests over this difficult time and to get tea parties back up and running where possible.   

At the start of February, we decided to get in touch with as many of our group coordinators and drivers as possible to make sure we were up to date with your needs and ideas.  In February and March, we spoke to over 400 group coordinators and nearly 2,500 drivers: the feedback that you gave us has been invaluable and will help us plan how we can best work with you going forward.  

Group coordinators: what you told us 

Half the group coordinators we spoke to told us you're currently running tea parties for your groups – and we’re thrilled to hear that. The vast majority of you who aren’t yet up and running are in regular contact with your guests and volunteers and plan to restart tea parties when you can. Thank you for your continued commitment to the older people you support.  

On average, our group coordinators told us you need to us to recruit two drivers, three hosts, and three guests.  Thanks so much for sharing this information with us. When we hear of a vacancy in a group, we start the process of recruiting by checking our waiting lists of volunteers who have already applied. We also put all volunteer vacancies on our online map to make it easier for volunteers to find what roles are available. The next steps involve our communications team working with both traditional media, such as local press, and social media. Meanwhile, our community engagement team gets to work with our network of referrers to let them know about gaps in the groups for older guests.  

Your feedback over the phone has helped us a lot. We now know you're most likely to get in touch with Re-engage about recruiting and onboarding volunteers and guests (42%). One in five of you is most likely to have questions about running tea parties ‘post-Covid’. Meanwhile, one third of you have told us that you’d like us to improve our communication and information sharing. Thank you for this feedback. The whole Re-engage team is now focusing their efforts on listening to, and learning from, your feedback, responding to your requests for help and answering individual questions.  

Drivers: what you told us  

The very good news from our drivers is that three quarters  of you told us that you want to continue driving for your groups. A third of you haven’t driven since February/ March 2020 and had questions about how your group was doing and when tea parties could re-start.  If that’s you, please be assured that we’re in touch with your group coordinators to find out what we can do to help get those tea parties get back up and running and you back driving again.  

At the start of the pandemic, one of the things we developed was improved training for our volunteers and you can find a whole suite of training and information in the volunteer resources section of the website.  

This is new for a lot of our drivers coming back post-Covid. So, while most of our drivers told us that you’ve completed your DBS/PVG checks, only a third of you have read gone through the online training modules. You can find the driver training materials on our website.   

And finally  

Thank you to everyone who spoke to us over the phone.  The help and feedback you gave during the calls was invaluable in helping us ensure that our team can best respond to your needs. Whilst our service delivery team is responding to your individual questions and requests for help, our communications team has already started work on securing local and social media coverage to recruit new volunteers and older guests to your groups.    

We also have resources available on our website, including downloadable photographs and suggested text for social media and news articles. And finally, we have flyers and leaflets available on our website to help you recruit guests and volunteers to your groups which we can send to you on request.