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Apologies, Scalectrics and Carpet Shampoo

Apologies - last week some people received several duplicate newsletters and others received no newsletter at all. If you are in either group we are sorry and grateful for your patience.

If you are interested in what happened we're doing some complicated things behind the scenes which will make Streetbank faster and ensure that very few messages forwarded to your email get junked. The complicated things went wrong... While we are on the subject of junked emails, if you have sent a message recently and received no response please don't give up on humanity! - it is more likely to be that the message was junked - or possibly junked on the way back to you by your email system. We hate the idea that Streetbank could dim people's views of their neighbours - our hope is that Streetbank highlights how generous most people are.

In fact, just last week a carpet shampoo machine was requested, a scalectrics set was given away and IT assistance was provided through Streetbank among many other things. When we look at the patterns of making requests and responding to requests one thing we notice is that requests are often made by people who have very recently helped someone else. We think this is because if you have helped someone you feel you have more permission to ask for help from someone else.  We think the message here is:

1/ don’t be shy to ask as you may well be giving your neighbour a bit of courage to ask for help from someone else

2/ there is a good chance that if someone requests something of you the person asking will have just helped someone else (though they’ll no doubt be far too polite to say!)

Have a great week

Sam and the Streetbank Team