Recently the New Saints Project has grown huge in terms of number of people involved, soon its going to get even bigger because I've just submitted four job adverts to heritage/arts websites for consultant/contract style jobs attached to the project.
First of all, the speedy growth of the Hunky Punk Project
Initially, we created a partnership with Somerset Art Works, who're based in Langport, which created 1 day/week of work for a SAW Development Officer.
Then, we created our partnership with the Event Management Students at Bridgwater College, providing an extra 22 young brains with approximately 3hrs/week time on the project.
Then, we used that partnership to expand our Hunky Punk Art Workshop part of the project, and advertise for a professional freelance artist to lead school/community workshops.
From that we found three artists that we wanted to work with, and two of them were 'young'! (according to HLF guidelines!) The dilemma here was that we only had the funding to pay for one artist, but SAW came to the rescue with Progression Support grants for young professional artists, which ultimately meant that the project could employ one young lead artist, and support two more artists to work on the project, hooraaaaaay!
This much increased capacity in-turn meant that we could organise more Hunky Punk workshops, and share the projects with more primary and secondary schools, which we're embarking on in March and April. The involvement of Bridgwater College has meant that we can hold two public events rather than one; one community workshop to build more and more Hunky Punks, and one Showcase Exhibition during Langport Community Festival (another valuable partnership!)
Now, onto the jobs!
Today I've spent a lot of time submitting job adverts to heritage and arts job websites. This has been a little bit scary because the contract salaries represent a sizeable chunk of the project finances, and I'm effectively spending it all in one go... eek!
As of tomorrow, our Evaluation Consultant, Interpretation Consultant, Community Archives Adviser and Community Archives Expert jobs will be live on:
- University of Leicester Museum Studies JobDesk
- Our profile on Creative Somerset
(I'm still working on a few other sites which involve calling in favours, diplomacy and membership registration... I'll keep you posted...)
Does anyone have any recommendations for other (free) heritage/arts job sites that I can use?
If you're interested, pleased get in touch and ask, I'm very happy to send out briefs, answer questions, and put people in touch with people.
