00:00Hello and welcome to Manchester World. My name is Theo Hewson-Bertz and today I'm at the House of
00:04Books and Friends to do a little piece on some of the amazing community initiatives that they have
00:08here. It's a cafe and bookstore with a wonderful purpose and a wonderful story. So let's talk to
00:14Naomi who's going to tell us a little bit more about it. My name is Naomi Self. I'm the bookshop
00:19manager at House of Books and Friends. Okay so House of Books and Friends is an independent
00:25bookshop and cafe. We are also a community interest company which means that we are set up with a
00:31specific social mission. So we try to prevent loneliness and social isolation. We are funded
00:38and founded by a law firm called Gunna Cook and one of the founders, Daryl, he's particularly
00:44passionate about the cause of loneliness and social isolation and he came up with the idea of
00:50merging his two passions, the reading and loneliness prevention and came up with the idea to connect
00:56people via a bookshop. We opened a week before Christmas in 2022 which was a bold move but it
01:04worked for us. It worked for us. It was nice to be there just that week before Christmas when perhaps
01:09people had kind of got all of their, most of their shopping and they were just looking for the odd
01:14things. They had a bit of time to look around and enjoy a brand new bookshop. Did the pay-it-forward
01:19the coffees are there? We have a lot of really kind and generous customers who donate to that. We
01:24also have a pay-it-forward book scheme as well where we collect books for local organisations and
01:31charities and our customers are really generous with those as well. And I think for people knowing
01:38that that option is there, we have some groups who come in and use the pay-it-forward coffees. We even
01:48have some people who maybe go through different, I guess, financial situations in their life. So
01:57maybe one month they'll be redeeming a pay-it-forward token and like maybe next month when times are a
02:05little bit better they say, well I'd like to give one now because I'm in a better position. So
02:09it's nice to see, it's nice to see that they want to pay it forward to the next person who's in their
02:14positions. Loneliness is a very, I guess, it's almost a very slippery kind of issue because it
02:20affects people of all different ages, backgrounds and what we try and do here is create kind of
02:29different ways for people to connect and interact with us, interact with other customers. So we run
02:35our book clubs. Some people may just be looking for one book club meeting a month and that fills their
02:41social battery and that's what they're here for. And for some people that might be all they need for
02:46the day. They might be on the more introverted side but they do enjoy just talking about the book
02:52they're buying for two minutes to someone. And so we try and just make it as open as possible.
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