Our annual planning process went well this September, leaving us with clear action plans for another good year and beyond.

It may seem, to the untrained eye. that all we do is sit around drinking tea and chatting with friends who come by, but all this sociability takes some planning and we've spent the best part of September closeted away planning our next year.

We are all part-time workers here and planning takes a surprising lot of work and thought. We revisited our goals and aims, evaluated our past year, looking at successes and improvements that we could make, spent some time on self-evaluation, what we have done well and where we'd like to improve and what support we need in order to do the things we want to do.

Then, moving on to the coming year: we have several challenges coming up - Mino and Aya are having to return to Japan in January and so we are losing two very valuable members of the team as well as our good friends :-(. Also the JRCT funding which funds Heather and Mark's posts runs out next September and so we need to think about our longer term sustainability.

Hence a big priority for us this early part of this year is to apply for some core funding so that we can continue after next year. We are also looking at and strengthening all our structures and systems, as we have evolved from being just Heather and Mark at the beginning, working from our front room, to being a team of eight people with premises and a big programme.

We are excited and enthusiastic about the future and have lots of ideas and plans. We have some health and some interfaith work that we are planning and have started on. We are rethinking our young people's program, and Aman's role is changing into young people's development worker (rather than youth worker). Mark and Angela are working on getting all of our office systems working well and Fatima is taking on a bigger and more defined role as women's development and health worker.

We were pleased with the outcome of our planning process - all we need to do now is to get on and make more tea!