Oxford Sling Meet has had a tremendously exciting first year. Our inaugural very informal meet was organised on the national Sling Meet website and held in February 2008 when 9 mothers and 8 children gathered in the playroom at Rose Hill-Littlemore Children’s Centre. After that, interest in the group grew quickly so that by May 2008 we were hiring the Children’s Centre’s Family Learning Room for monthly meetings, we had a new committee of four volunteers and had just launched Oxfordshire Sling Library with some very generous donations from sling vendors and local parents.

Since then word has spread and the group and library have grown beautifully. Oxfordshire Sling Library now contains nearly 60 items and we regularly welcome 20-30 parents plus babies and toddlers to monthly slingmeets. We quickly outgrew the old venue and now hire St Luke’s Church for meets. Because of the large numbers attending, slingmeets have become more structured with a ‘demonstration’ session to teach particular babywearing skills and carries to a large group, as well as our volunteers and experienced parents continuing to help those coming to slingmeets one-to-one.

Our committee now includes three people after we said goodbye to Melanie Fraser, who moved away. Chair and Librarian: Guin Webster, Treasurer: Peggy Cheyo, Webmistress: Catherine Carr. We hope to recruit another volunteer to the Librarian role.

We have welcomed over 190 parents and grandparents, 150 babies, 30 toddlers and 8 preschoolers since slingmeets started. Attenders have ranged from women pregnant with their first baby to experienced babywearers with toddlers, families who are exploring slings to ease the transition to a second or subsequent child, and several parents with twins. We have been delighted to notice our regular attenders and members growing in skill and confidence with babywearing and passing on their skills and help to newcomers. We have hired over 115 slings from the library. That makes for a lot of happily carried children! We started a membership scheme in June 2008 and now have 59 members.

As well as the monthly slingmeets and some informal social meetings, Oxford Sling Meet arranged some other highly successful events in 2008. We organised roadshows to promote Oxfordshire Sling Library in Oxford, Banbury, Abingdon and Chipping Norton. We wrote an article promoting the group and the benefits of babywearing, which was published in the Chipping Norton and Oxford NCT branches’ newsletters. We also arranged some special events to celebrate International Babywearing Week in November: a babywearing dance class led by Chloe De Sousa, and a babywearing parade through Oxford followed by tea and cake. Jo Bowlt provided some excellent PR and we were pleased to be featured in the local newspaper and to appear on local TV news.

Financial report

Oxford Sling Meet is a not-for-profit association; any profits generated are put back into running the group and library. Oxfordshire Sling Library has had a successful first year and has generated income to help cover venue hire as well as acquire new library items and hold events for International Babywearing Week. Oxford Sling Meet’s total income up to 31st March 2009 was £770.17 while total expenditure was £603.80, leaving a net balance of £192.37. This breaks down as follows:

Income: Expenses:

Donations: £198.17 Venue hire: £248.50

Memberships: £270.00 Sling purchases: £252.45

Sling hire: £302.00 Stationery + expenses for meets: £46.85

Dance Class: £20.00

Fuel to Chipping Norton for Roadshow: £16.00

Our immediate financial priority is to save up enough profit to purchase an insurance premium so that our sling meets are insured.

Website report

The Oxford Sling Meet website was launched in April 2008 and is hosted on the WordPress web log site. http://www.oxfordslingmeet.wordpress.com The site is used to promote upcoming Sling Meet dates, other related events and can also be used to post general babywearing information and photographs. Visits to the website peaked in November 2008 around the time of International Babywearing Week.

The graph below shows the number of visits per month, and was taken on 18th March 2009. Please note that March 2009 is an incomplete month, which accounts for the low count.

We regularly receive traffic to the website from the national Sling Meet website, Natural Mamas (UK based Natural Parenting forum), Babywearing International, Tumbebe (Oxford babywearing tutor and vendor) and Netmums, amongst others. We have a number of related web links on our site, and our records show that the most popular links that people click on are LLL Oxford and the Flickr Ethnic Babywearing Photo Set. Our search engine rating is good – people are able to search using terms like “sling meetings oxford” and “sling library oxford” and find our site as the number one place in Google.

We have a Yahoo Chat Group which is used for promoting the upcoming Sling Meets and for general chat. There are 60 members on the email list for this group, and a total of 536 messages have been sent. In the future we plan to register the domain www.oxfordslingmeet.co.uk and move the website to there. This will give us more flexibility with the design and functionality of the site. We also hope to post more general babywearing information and chat on the site.

Future plans

We will of course be continuing with the monthly slingmeets – that alone will certainly keep us busy! A priority is purchasing insurance so that the group is covered in the event of an accident at our meets. After that we will continue to plough any profits into expanding Oxfordshire Sling Library, until it reaches the point where it is becoming too large for a volunteer to administer.

We would like to develop our outreach to groups who may be less likely to come to slingmeets, or who would especially benefit from babywearing, for instance by arranging events at postnatal groups, and groups for young mothers and those vulnerable to postnatal depression.

Oxford Sling Meet is also contributing to the development of Kangaroo Playgroup, a new playgroup focusing on natural/ecological and attachment parenting approaches.

A longer term plan is to explore the possibility of grant funding which could help to develop the group.

We welcome comments on this report and offers of help in running the group. Please contact us via http://oxfordslingmeet.wordpress.com

Guinevere Webster, Peggy Cheyo and Catherine Carr (current Committee), March 2009