A Roundup of 2025 at Oasis

Anthony French, Chair of Trustees, reports on an eventful year at Oasis.

It's been an exciting year of change for us at Oasis!

At the start of the year we began work on migrating away from our old shop management system which had handled our business for a couple of decades.  In May we went live with a new leading-edge system, which offers many up-to-date features for helping us to run the business more effectively.  Notably, it provides us with a fresh customer interface and, something we'd been yearning for for a long time, an online shopping capability.  We're hugely grateful for the efforts of our consultant, Nicholas Hill, and to the staff at Oasis for all the effort and time (and patience!) they've put into making this happen.

Thanks to its Cloud-based data and integrated payments, it has also made it easier to operate the numerous pop-ups we've been doing this year - with thanks to our Manager, Dave Lock, for all the effort he has put into these, and to our much-welcomed customers at conferences, seminars and churches at which Oasis has been invited to appear.

In conjunction with launching our new e-commerce website, we've been able to increase our regular email communications with customers and supporters (so if you haven’t yet signed up for our email newsletters, please do so on our home page or here).  Our social media profile has also been increasing, starting on Facebook and Instagram, with further exciting plans for the new year (again, if you happen to be on Instagram, please do consider following us here).

As our local supporters will know, it may have taken us a while, but but we finally removed the 'Covid screen' from the shop counter, thereby bringing us closer together with our very much treasured shop visitors.

In September another empassioned ambition was realised. Following a successful crowd-funding campaign (for which, Thank You Lord!) we were delighted (well, more than that actually) to finally erect new signage above the shop window.  Whooopeee! (sorry, I couldn't hold that back!)  If you've not seen it yet, do please pop in and say hello - we'd love to hear what you think. The signage, as you'll see particularly from our earlier blogs, incorporates our new branding - gone is our faithful old camel, and in comes a cross!

We're excited about these positive moves, but times remain tough for many shops on the high street, Christian ones in particular; we've been very saddened at just how many have disappeared in recent years. But, as you can see, despite sharing in these tough times, we've responded by taking steps to make ourselves more relevant, and to extend our reach, with a view to remaining to represent Jesus on the high street for as long as God wishes us to be there; He told us a life of witness isn't going to be easy... but we take that as an encouragement!

Thank you all for the wonderfully encouraging support you provide to us whether you come to Oasis for your resource needs... or even just for a chat - we love it!  May God bless you all, richly!