 I'm Caroline Evans, I'm the Business Manager at Kletter. And I'm Jen Guyke, and I'm the Kitchen Manager at Kletter. It is quite a long story, so I'll try and keep it quite brief. Kletter was an old site basically that had been closed for a number of years. It was an old cafe or petrol station, an old shop. And the community came together really to open it with the existing owner. And we opened it and sort of ran it for about a year just as a shop. And a very small cafe, it just had teas, coffees and cakes to take away to eat in at that time. And then we were lucky enough to get a big lottery grant, along with a few others, which made us be able to buy the site, build a brand new Kletter, which has been open for nearly three years. So that's kind of the history of it. My name is Nigel Callaghan, and I've been volunteering here at Kletter since we opened seven years ago. But I'm currently chairman of the company. Kletter fundamentally is a group who wants to make our community better. That the whole thinking behind it when we started was we were triggered by the lack of facilities. Pretty well everything in the community had closed. The old Kletter building had been the last shop and cafe we had that had closed. We were down to a pub that's still going. But since we opened the schools closed, the churches closed, there was nothing. And there are no opportunities for people in the community to meet each other. And the driving force from day one is to improve the community in any way we can. And so we are set up as a not-for-profit business. And the aim now is that we do generate a surplus. That surplus is plowed back into community activities. So we can afford to pay a part-time community co-op data to organise events. And all that comes out of the surplus when we shop on the cafe. And so now in normal times we have a massive programme of events of all sorts. It's a chance for people to meet each other. It's been impressive. I've lived here for 25 years, something like that now. And I've met people through Kletter activities who've lived in the community for 20 years. And I've never met them before because where would you have been? And it's keeping people employed on a local basis as well. Well, when we first started out, we decided or Karen decided that we would employ local teenagers. There are very few jobs around here for local teens, very, very few. So that takes the pressure off them a bit. They're getting some money. It takes the pressure off their parents because their kids are earning some money on their own. It gives them life skills. It gives them employment skills. It gives them a CV. It gives them a reference for college or for university or for another employer. All of that, it all comes back down to your time, all the little tiny bits in. So one of the girls that's working here today, she's worked here for a year. She works in the kitchen with me. Her mum is one of our suppliers. It's all interlinked. It's a big web and it all pulls together. I think it's grown even more and more, to be honest with you. And I think one of our equals here is supporting local producers as well within the area, which we massively do and there's more and more of a time. So I think the community vibe a bit all is just evolving more and more all the time. I think I've got about 73 suppliers in total here, which it's hard going with all of them. And that's why it's so important to have the volunteers here. But we've got W. Dairie, who are a new supplier doing halloumi, yoghurt, fudge. We've literally last week started supporting them. Penalas strawberries. If you've never had a Penalas strawberry, you've never had a strawberry yet. Local honey. We've got Richard in the village. Next village. Next village. As with eggs, vanilla, very local, organic, free range eggs. Local potatoes. So we've got some suppliers that only just do one product. They're from Cappabanga. So there are more and more all the time and I think that the importance of local suppliers is actually increasing. And I think that the customer's knowledge on them now are looking for local products. That's what customers are looking for very much so. My buying ethos has always been local Welsh British to any dip. If customers want it, there's a demand for it. Obviously we need it. But that's always been my ethos, always trying local Welsh British to any dip. I think to compete with supermarkets, you don't have the buying power of supermarkets. So you need something different. So we apply the same principle to the cafe. We're never going to be the cheapest breakfast in the area. Because we went for quality. It was as simple as that. And as we expanded our menu, the cafe got bigger and a bigger part of the business, we taste tested. So we decided which sausages we wanted, not on the price point, but how they tasted it. Same with our eggs. Sit all the stuff down. OK, taste these eggs. Tell me which one you like the best. Like pudding, we did the same. We make our own preserves. Because we hate waste. So anything that comes out of the shop, if we can't make a soup out of it, can we make a chutney out of it? If we can't do that, can we make a jam out of it? Can we make a special out of it? And if we can't do that, we have a volunteer who will take it away and compost it. We had to literally change our business overnight, really, when we were kind of hit. The cafe had to close overnight. The demand on the community for the shopping, the food. And for different goods, what they were buying changed as well. Yeah, very much so. I mean, our fruit and veg probably went up, bearing in mind it was March, and our fruit and veg tripled completely overnight. So you had to react quite quick to it as well. About a week before we went on to lockdown, really the board members got together and we put a plan together, a coronavirus plan. So we kind of knew what we were going to do straight away, which actually helped because we were prepared for it. And that really helped us, I think, for definite. And it helped the community. So we had a board member who looked at a website, changed that overnight, you know, put order forms on there. So people communicating with your community was the hardest thing because everybody was in lockdown. So social media, what's in the shop every day? So we were taking pictures. We had an ex-employee that had left a few months prior to open her own vegan deli. And she obviously had to close it. So I went, please can you help us? So she volunteered every morning for an hour, and she put up social media on the website, emailed it out to people on our list. And the list got bigger and bigger and bigger, you know? Since we've opened, we've done a reverse credit scheme in Kletter, which what it basically does is, you give me £50, for example, so I can buy the stock. So when we first have an open, the community sort of put £50 on accounts for themselves, and we could buy the stock, and then they came in and they spent that money. So we enhanced that. We encouraged that really in lockdown. I said, right, pay it into the bank. This is our bank account number. We'll put it on our till system. You can just order, we can deliver. So there was no contact at all. Volunteers were... There's lots of volunteers that came forward to help us. That was so responsive. It was great, yeah. I mean, there was one week, I think we did 110 orders in one week. You know, there was probably about 30 of those delivered, others were collected. And that's a completely new part of our business. It wasn't a service that we'd really offered before, but we were able to react really quickly. Our volunteers came forward, and we could roll it out for the wider community, whether it was people who were not terribly keen on coming into the shop physically, or people who were isolating for their own health. All of them, I mean, the shielding, we're still supporting the shielding. So we've got four orders this morning. We've now reduced out of the few days to a Monday and a Friday only, but you can collect every day. But there are still people that shielding and don't want to actually come into the building. I don't know if I should say this, but because we're so busy on the Welsh coast here as well, that some of them are even more frightened now because they don't want to leave. So it's really important that we're still supporting those. But even the younger people, it was just important that they felt safe that they could come into a building. We limited it to three people per in the shop. So really showing them that safeness and communicating that out on all the social media platforms or emails or websites that we've got, that was important. We had all bases, you know. In the very beginning, when they actually closed the cafe down, when we had to close the cafe, we looked at all the stocks that we had in, and that's money sat in the stock room, not earning anything. And we moved it to the shop. It was as simple as that. Because we had difficulty getting a lot of items in. Flower was the example, obviously. So we moved our stock. We bagged it, we had volunteers in there, weigh it, bag it, label it, get it in the shop. We couldn't get yeast for love and money. So a couple of volunteers gave us sourdough starters. We grew it, and we kept it going. And we gave it away to customers. We can't do yeast. Here's a sourdough starter. Look the recipe up online or where you go. Let us know how you get on. Well, it was a war, wasn't it? I think COVID is a war. You know, it's World War III in so many ways, isn't it? It doesn't, you know, I think so. And it just goes to show how communities can come together, I think. And I think it's important that none of us forget that. And I think that people have actually come to realise how important local actually is for deaf and deaf.