Happy New Year to all of our friends and supporters

2010 was an eventful, exciting, challenging and successful year with great gains (Looch started with us as a men's health worker; while Earl, Saboor and Shell joined us on a six-month government scheme) and some sad losses (Aya and Mino moved back to Japan and Aman moved on to University – all positive moves for them but not so much for us).

Meanwhile Abdullah, Shazia and Uzma are all doing student placements here and each brings new enthusiasm, strengths, excitement and energy. Click here for news of what's ahead in 2011.

Our biggest funding stream, which was the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust "Visionary" scholarship with which Heather and Mark set up the project, came to an end in September. Many thanks to all at JRCT for five years support which enabled FolesHillfields to begin.

A key challenge for us is to keep raising and earning enough that we can continue to build on what we have and get even more better at what we do. Money has been a big issue for most of our participants/volunteers and staff as jobs get scarcer, as public services are cut and as job security becomes more and more a thing of the past and so it's not surprising that our project finds itself in the same precarious position.

Still we have had some successes and some promising signs (including a recent award from the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation for which we are very grateful) and we are very hopeful that we will be able to continue what we do, and do more of it, with your help as ever.

In fact we are very optimistic about the year ahead and have a lot of exciting plans. All of our regular activities will be on going – Open House on Wednesday afternoons, gardening, Women's lunch once a month and Women's coffee afternoons, plus the occasional Men's Monday.

We are also starting a new schools project called “Step Up”, we will be working with 16 local young people from Sidney Stringer Academy to develop their community leadership skills. This is starting in a couple of weeks and we had a great time interviewing some great kids to participate – we were really sad that we couldn't take them all, because they were all amazing, but we chose a nice diverse group to work with. We are very excited about this project which is a new thing for us, using what we have learned from our Global Citizenship programme with primary schools and the work that we did with our youth group “Peacejam”

We are also planning to have more interfaith work, more dialogue events, more social events and lots more, so if you want to get involved as a volunteer, please let us know and if you want to be on our mail out or text out list please send us your contact details and otherwise, keep an eye on our website – look in the online calendar to see what is on and come on down and have some fun!

Hope you all have a great 2011!