Problem with multiple loops and custom post type

I have an issue with using multiple instances of WP_query through the php code widget, at least I think that’s the problem. I’m building a website for a roller derby team and on their landingpage I display the 5 latest news items. In the sidebar I want to show information about oncoming events.

There are 3 types of events (fresh meat day, bouts and public events). I’ve made a custom post type (event) that can be used to add a new event. The user can choose from 3 different taxonomies (fresh_meat_day, bout and public_event) to put the event posts in.

I’ve managed to get this al working, as well as creating a designated page to show all events. What I want is for the ‘Home’ page to display the next event for each event type, but I can’t seem to get this working. I’m trying to display them in my sidebar, by using the php code widget. The widget seems to work fine (if I assign a value to a variable and tell wordpress to display the variable, it does). But when I try to use WP_query it doesn’t give any output.

My ‘Home’ page uses WP_query to pull the latest 5 news posts so I thought this could maybe be some sort of conflict between WP-queries, I tried to reset WP query and rewind posts, but this doesn’t do the trick. Any thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated!