Love Running is proud to belong to Newport Business Association, and has been a member since the current Association formed in 2011. We believe retailers need to pull together in town to make shopping a pleasant experience, to make our wonderful, historic town a lovely place to visit and to make our voice heard in the council offices with regard to parking, building, town pride, town maintenance & planning, safety and green spaces within town and all the other matters that affect us all.
Independant retailers are also stronger if they can coordinate events, promote each other and each do their bit to make our little shops and businesses unique, pleasant to visit and successful.
Because of his accountancy experience, Simon became Treasurer back in 2015. Jo became Membership Secretary in 2016 and then became Secretary in 2022. Both still hold those roles.
2018 was busy for the NBA as we worked with the NCC and IWC to help ARC consultants produce the big “Reshaping Newport” project. ARC carried out a huge survey of local people, students, workers, retailers and employers, and the NBA helped to finance the final report of this survey. The report includes quick and easy improvements, logistical reports, long-term suggestions and all kinds of exciting ideas to improve the appearance, the traffic-flow, the parking and the longevity of this historic town.
Shaping Newport was officially adopted by the IWC in 2019.
We have also discussed many environmental improvements such as “Plastic Free Island” (in conjuction with Surfers Against Sewage) https://www.sas.org.uk/region/south-east/ , the SYSTRA car-share plan and the Chamber of Commerce “Green Impact” plan, which was launched by the NBA’s Vice Chair Julie Jones-Evans in 2018: https://www.iwchamber.co.uk/news/green-impact-scheme-launched-at-conference/
Love Running signed up to Green Impact in June 2018 and worked through the step-by-step ideas, recommendations and advice to make our business as environmentally-friendly as possible, and earn points towards the ultimate goal; a Gold Award. We already considered ourselves environmentally-friendly to a high degree, but Green Impact has shown us just how much we hadn’t considered and what more we can actually do at Love Running, and every change we make – and every point we earn closer to that Gold Award – gives us a warm glow!
NB: We won GOLD at the Green Impact presentation in 2019, and Jo also won a Special Award for creating the “Proud to be Plastic Free” campaign
If you have a local business and would like to join the NBA or attend the next meeting (they are the first Wednesday every month at different venues) here is the website: https://www.newportbusiness.co.uk/
Christmas Competitions
Since 2014 Jo has been the organiser of the annual town Christmas Window competition. In 2014 we did a themed window dressing competition (won by Readers Interiors, Doris Pinks and Take 2 hairdressers).
In 2015 she created a “Spot the Song” competition! The idea was that participating shops (we had 27 in 2015) each were given a random song lyric to display in their windows, and members of the public were asked to identify the Christmas songs they were from. The one who got the most correct would win, or it would go to a draw for a grand prize.
In 2016 we did the same competition (but with a whole new set of lyrics/songs of course!) and had THREE amazing prizes up for grabs.
In 2017 Jo organised the “Elf Days of Christmas” competition. Mandy Rawlings from Bijou Hairdressing designed a series of colourful and cheeky Elves, and each had a different name and character. Every participating shop displayed an elf and members of the public spent December spotting every elf, recording their names on the entry form and working out the “Christmas Conundrum”. All correct answers went into a big prize draw.
2018 was “The Adventures of Alfie“. Alfie – the NBA Elf – spent the year with lots of different retailers getting into all kinds of mischief, and a series of postcards were created. Each one contained Alfie in a different place with a clue, and the clues lead to a final answer.
In 2019 Jo created “Have Your Elf a Merry Little Christmas“, which featured a whole posse of elves with clues.
2020 was – of course – cancelled due to Covid, but Jo was back in 2021 with “The Festive Film Hunt“, in which shoppers were tasked with identifying 26 popular family films from an image shown by each participating shop. This was Jo’s favourite creation! Weirdly the winners – pulled out in the random prize draw – turned out to be related, with Mr Corral senior AND his son and daughter all winning the top prizes!
2022 feartured a similar film competition, but this time called Disney Magic, and the prizes were bigger and better than ever before, meaning that we had more winners, and more children taking part:
2023 was so much fun! Inspired by a comment made by a previous winner, Jo created “Here Comes Santa Paws“. The game was to identify as many of the animated dogs displayed as possible! This proved very popular, and Newport Community Council kindly hosted a lovely prize presentation for the many winners.
2024 is a Work In Progress, but watch out for “Jungle All the Way“!