So, to start with, last Friday I had a meeting with Peter to show him where we'd got to with the project planning, and for him to advise on next steps. One of the strongest effects of this meeting was my realisation that I'm a conservation nazi! I'm one of those people who puts red rope banners around historic houses so that mere human beings can't touch the precious history! This has got to stop immediately!
I need to take off my 'Don't Touch That' hat, and put on my 'Wahey, Lets See What Happens If We Do This' hat, which is a much more exciting hat anyway.
Part of this is in the way I pitch the project to the young people - less talking about the limitations of a listed building and more of the opportunities that this project provides.
Another part is the way I write documents. Peter used the word 'boring', I prefer the term 'grown-up', but neither of them make for an exciting public document!
Peter also shouted at me for not having made proper contact with the Heritage Lottery Fund yet, so today I've downloaded the Pre-application Form for Young Roots funding, and have started filling in the bits we definitely know about our project. Once Melita's had a go too we can send it to the SW HLF team and see what they think about our project, woop!
On Monday, Melita and I were in the South West for two meetings - one for us to visit Yeovil Foyer Foundation, and the other to meet Langportian young people who might be interested in being involved with the project.
The YFF was a good meeting, Chris showed us around the converted church and gave us details of the building manager for us to ask more indepth questions. He also made a nice little offer for the YFF to deal with all the paperwork if our young people wanted to use our project to work towards an ASDAN Award. We haven't decided whether this is the route for us, or whether other organisations might be able to offer the same, but it has highlighted to me how project partners can still offer useful resources without them stumping up funding.
This ended up being the first of our Serendipitous Connections in that Melita hadn't known about YFF before, and I hadn't realised the extent to which it could be useful, but because we turned up and made the connection with Chris and got details for further connections, we can now use this project as an exemplar further down the road, hooray!
The second meeting was at Art Tea Zen (fantastic name for an unorthodox cafe/teashop).
The original plan here was for Annie to have rounded up 3 or 4 young people for Melita and I to lightly pitch the project to, to see whether they were interested. Out of the original 3, 1 turned up.
I don't really mind this - I'm not so out of touch with young people as to expect them to drop everything and come running when someone says 'church conservation'.
It also led to another Serendipitous Connection; Jack owns Art Tea Zen, he overheard the topic of our meeting and joined in! (he's a young person too). And there was me worrying about enthusiasm levels! Jack seemed very interested in getting involved, and has helped to organise another meeting next week where Melita and I can pitch the project to a larger group so that we can start the ball rolling proper, like.
From this, I learnt that all* the fuss was over nothing - young people aren't that scary, even when some of the young people aren't as young as me. Melita commented on my growing confidence whilst I was speaking, so next time I can build on today's experience and "sparkle" as Melita put it.
*(most of)
Finally, today's work included sorting out some Go&Sees for me and Melita in the near future. One of which is The Station, what I done already blogged about, and the other is the CCT's very own Bristol St Pauls, home of Circomedia, about which you can read in this blog which I wrote in a past-life.
I'm actually really looking forward to next week now, hopefully within a fortnight we will have got our group sorted and can begin doing things! Wooo!
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