Another busy week
We work hard here at FolesHillfields - and we do a lot of things that we don't always get time to tell our friends and supporters about in detail.
So here's a summary of some of what we got up to last week - from the 6th to the 10th October 2008 ...
Behind-the-scenes work - and visionary young people
We always begin the week by meeting to catch up with each other, and look at what's coming up - on Monday we spent some time working on preparations for some community engagement work we are carrying out locally on behalf of the City Council next week. This kind of work might not sound inspiring, and isn't central to our vision in some ways - but it fits well with our aims of promoting grassroots leadership, and is another opportunity to build relationships between people - and it pays for other work we do too!
Our Monday night Youth Group (currently called "PeaceJam") are always inspiring. Aman led a great exercise getting the young people thinking about their futures, and we had a first look at the plans that Mino, Aman and Mark have been helping the young people come up with for this term's activities. Looks good.
A celebratory Open Afternoon
Exactly one week late, we celebrated both Eid-ul-Fitr and Rosh Hashannah at what is becoming our regular Tuesday open afternoon. There was food and good company - perhaps the highlight was a phone call from Heather (currently in India), who had quick chats with around fourteen different people, and sang us all a song or two - the marvels of modern communications!
... and Nadia and Aya dug up some potatoes - a first for at least one of them ...
Beavering away, and a theatre trip
On Wednesday, Fatima organised a funding information event on behalf of the Heart of England Community Foundation, who were very pleased with it (again, paid work for FolesHillfields). Mark did administrative things, including lots of book-keeping, met with the organiser of UKOWLA's upcoming national conference to talk about our (significant) role in it, and did some more towards the community engagement thing.
Meanwhile, Aya pursued volunteers for several up-coming activities, including a trip that very evening to see The Boy with the Bomb in his Crisps, a play written from research into stories of migration and culture shock that we'd played a part in six months ago with our Traveller's Tales story-telling event. A diverse and friendly group headed down to the Belgrade for a funny and interesting evening - and some of us even got to chat to the actors at the after-show party ...
Planning and record-keeping
Thursday was a quiet day, but we managed to fit in two planning meetings - one to get the run-up to the UKOWLA conference laid out clearly, and one to wrestle with the details of having next week's community engagement meeting go as well as it can.
Fatemah P was in for a couple of hours today, as she is four days a week, making a huge difference to our ability to stay well organised and keep proper records.
A real challenge for our bold volunteers
As (at least theoretically) none of us are full-time, Fridays are often quiet. This one was a little busy though - making final plans and preparations for the after-show discussion/workshop we had agreed to lead after The Boy with the Bomb in his Crisps in the evening. The preparations included designing and printing a first batch of publicity for our three Peace Month events (watch this space!).
We'd booked a rehearsal room for an hour (while the show was on) for our volunteers to prepare in for the 30 mins of after-show event. Eleven of us made it down to the theatre - the usual diverse crowd, including some newer volunteers and some who've been around us and our approaches to things for a long while.
FolesHillfields does lots of listening to all kinds of people, and the core team has been encouraging people to listen to each other across social barriers for a while - and we've learned some useful things about making that go well. We've decided it's time to get bigger numbers of our volunteers practised and confident in getting people listening well to each other too - this was a great opportunity for that.
In the rehearsal room, leaders of small listening groups were assigned, teddy bears were thrown around, lots of worried questions were asked, we laughed a lot, and we practised listening to each other for set amounts of time (which we find makes peer relationships a lot easier to build between people who have different habits in relation to how much "airtime" they expect to take up!).
The theatre was much fuller than we had expected, and much more mono-cultural - including a whole coachload from a repertory theatre appreciation society. Gulp!
A triumphant end to the week
Our volunteers did absolutely brilliantly. Most of them had never led a listening group before - and most were nervous about telling groups of largely middle-class, middle-aged white strangers to shut up after they'd had their turn. They turned out to be great at that!
We gave each audience member 60 seconds in the small groups to tell a bit of their own story - and people loved it. The organiser of the coachload made a short and delighted thank you speech about what a great evening they'd had - and the actors and directors seemed to enjoy themselves a lot too.
Most importantly for us, our team did great - Puner was rightly very impressed with herself, Angela loved assisting her, Ayesha did great with no assistance at all - the list goes on.
Bring on next week!
