Hi guys !
Were you at Skippergata 22 on August 27th, with us? Sorry if I didn’t say hello in person, I was busy timing the pitchers. Not that I had that much to do this time, most of them were very concise and did not push the 4′ limits that we have.

I must say, August events have a special aura. They are a bit more demanding than others because, as you well now, August happens to be during summer time (probably høst/autumn for Norwegians though…).

For us, this means that we need to maintain our efforts on a longer period (5 months from April to August !) that includes the summer break. We are unfortunately more likely to fall into that Bermuda’s triangle of emails: they are sent and disappear in the mist of summer heat.

Additionnaly we had private happy-news: our dear Giulia got married and our dear Tara became the mother of sweet Ian (who has since then attended all oslo soup meetings – I think he will get his business cards soon).

But you know what? We’re improving all the time and one of our biggest organizational additions was to set up an online form for our partners to fill in. It looked like this:

survey

Simple and efficient, that enabled us to centralize all donations with the contact details of our partners. We are definitely re-using this for the coming events !

This worked well for our food and raffle partners (an infinite thanks to all of them), but we did have a few other things to work on.

Finding out the venue for the subsequent event was a major discussion topic. Our events are growing, you are more and more to join us everytime. And we still have no money to rent spaces. It’s a matter of principles, we want our concept to work based on generosity from partners.
We visited The Kasbah Hub who had kindly offered us space. This place is awesome for co-working but it seemed a bit difficult for us to have our audience rambling through the stuff of hard-working startupers.
Fortunately, we were lucky to meet with the manager of CAK on a very rainy day (does rain bring good luck ?). This super venue has a vibe that we know will resonate into our fans’ hearts. We really hope that you will be many to join us, to discover them and support them. They are celebrating their 40-years anniversary, can you believe that? Stay tuned for more details in upcoming communications.

Look at me, I’m already babbling about our next event when I have so much to tell you about what happened this summer !

Cause you know, we did have a lot going on.  We did get crowdfunded on bidra.no. Yep. Us. The crowdfunding-events organizers.
More precisely, we crowdfunded these babies:

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No I’m not talking about our volunteers. Look at the two big black things to the right of the pictures. Yes, that’s right, we got ourselves suppegryter (soup warmers in English I believe). That is going to make our lives so much easier. No need to stress about finding a venue with a kitchen, we’re almost self-sutstained !

Next improvement: the spoon-ation ! That may have gone under the radar of many, but we did ask people to come to the event with their own spoon and… leave it to us (if they wanted). We are now owning almost 100 spoons, thanks to that and a few private donations of bigger batches.

One addition did not go under the radar, however, cause it was so pretty that many of you took it home: the menu !

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Designed by the fantastic Scribbles by Shahz, this was meant to give more visibility to our wonderful donators. You will find a list of all of them on our dedicated page . Please go, check them out, like them on Facebook (and like us while you’re there). They deserve all your love.

It’s their food that helped your brain work hard to choose between the four amazing projects that presented (descriptions here).

First to pitch was Saroj, who presented her project “Antology Publication”.

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Saroj for Antology Publication

Next up was Jimmy for The Human Aspect

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Jimmy for The Human Aspect

Followed by Ewoud, who talked about his Incredible Globe project:

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Ewoud for Incredible Globe

And last but not least, Aaron presented Young Storytellers – and he won !

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Aaron for Young Storytellers

These great pitches were preceeded by an inspiring pitch from Aiman Shaqura who funded Charge Incubator and followed by an equally inspiring story by Mari Hult, the author of Vegetarbloggen.

Thank you Antara for the wonderful pictures 🙂

And you, dear reader, you can re-live the event thanks to Mohri Films: check their creation on our YouTube channel  (you can turn on the French subtitles, oui oui).

Looking forward to meeting you at our next event  on November 26th, at CAK !

xoxo

Margot, on behalf of the oslo soup team

PS: we’re always welcoming new food donators if you have, by any chance, a catering business or a friend in a catering business or a friend of a friend in a catering business or a friend of a friend of…