So many things!!

This post is just going to be a general catch-up of everything that has happened last Friday, yesterday and today, because there's a lot!

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!

Preparing for Monday's meeting

I've had a final flurry of activity today as I realised that I won't be at work again properly until Monday when the meeting with the young people is happening! Eek!

Fortunately I've got a catch-up with Melita planned for earlier on Monday, where she can reassure me that we are prepared and that young people aren't really that scary...

This afternoon's been focussed on preparing documents that establish the roles of individuals and organisations within the project, after asking the Regeneration Taskforce for some advice I've been given lots and lots of information with about 20 minutes before I go home! Lots of note-taking and keeping things at the top of my mind!
I've been drafting organograms for the project and trying to find an up-to-date one for the Trust.  I've also been discussing Memorandums of Understanding, and trying to work out the best method to keep in touch with the young people once they've committed.  Good strong business philosophy stuff!

Staff Away Day - Birmingham

Today was a little bit different.  We went to Birmingham!

The Churches Conservation Trust hold two annual 'Staff Away Days', one at Christmas to round up the year and one at another significant point in the year.  This one coincided with the end of the financial year and the results of the CCT's restructuring due to government cuts to its core funding.

From my perspective the day was very useful, it gave me a good view of how I fit into the Trust, and how the All Saints Langport, Youth Project fits into the Trust's portfolio.  The project might be the most important thing for my work at the moment, but its not the most important for the Regeneration Taskforce, or the CCT (the Regeneration Taskforce presented on two other projects in Bolton and Ipswich which have either been granted, or are currently raising millions of pounds for regeneration projects, by comparison, Langport is in the process of raising £25,000 ...)

The day was also a good milestone for making me think about where I'd like to be approximately 1 year from now, at the next Staff Away Day (which I hadn't really put much thought into before now).  The conclusion that I came to (which might or might not be a conclusive conclusion) was that where I'd like to be is employed with money from the HLF bid to continue working on the Langport Project as a Project Assistant for the CCT.  So the project has taken on a personal development panic as well as a professional development panic.  Hooray!...

On a less reflective note, the day was also useful in that I got chatting to Neil, an archaeologist who is also Conservation Manager in the South West for the CCT.  Neil has previous experience of working with young people, being the contact with Cathedral Camps* and leading a few youth-based CCT projects, so he may end up a very useful colleague within the Trust!

*I did a Cathedral Camp at Durham Cathedral when I was the tender, innocent age of 18, it was amazing.  We got to sweep pigeon poo out of the huge west towers.  Here is a picture of me being very cool in some overalls, aged 18.

Rationalising the exemplar project case studies list

Don't worry, I'm not entirely sure what it means either.

Today has been spent turning a series of emails saying 'we should go here!' and 'oooh, this project looks interesting' into a proper document listing the exemplar projects, and ones that we want to use as case studies for our project.

This means first of all sorting them into 'heritage', 'youth' or 'community asset' projects, or a combination of two, or all three.  This was the stage where I decided what a great idea it would be to investigate Microsoft Word's SmartArt application in making us a venn diagram of exemplar projects. It didn't go well, I wouldn't recommend it.  Its much easier to draw your own venn diagram using the normal shapes.

So anyway, then we establish whether we have a contact for that project and document their name, phone number, email address, website (and some of the more exciting youth projects have twitter accounts).  Then a couple of sentences explaining who they are and why they'd be useful for us (and whether they'd be more useful for Melita and I, or the youth group), and any publications they might have made available.  Finally we document the stage of contact we're at with them - whether we've got in touch, whether we want to make a trip to visit them, or just speak to them, or get them to visit us.  This will eventually include the date that we visited them, the lessons learnt and exactly what makes their project a best practice case study for us, but its a bit early days for that yet.

This document was put to good use almost straight after I finished it as we got a reply from our contact at The Station in Bristol, who gave us lots more people to contact, and places to get training and guidance from.  Score!

Working with volunteers and getting carried away with infographics

Today we made a great leap forward in that we have confirmed a day and time to meet with 3 young people, after a few falst starts last week, on the 21st March.  This meeting came through our contact at the Ridgeway Hall in Langport, Annie.  The meeting has been a bit of a challenge to organise because I only work 2 days a week, Melita has other projects to work on as well, Annie is a volunteer Youth Worker with other commitments, and the young people themselves have other commitments.

Getting a solid date for a meeting meant that we could start thinking about how we were going to perform the meeting - we've decided that an informal chat, establishing who everyone is and why we've come to the meeting.  This fits in with our 'completely transparent and honest about the project' policy, so I'm not expecting anyone's response to be 'because I love old buildings'!

This short meeting also means that Melita and I can fit in a trip to a local Go&See - the main contender at the moment being Yeovil Foyer Federation.  The Foyer Federation is a national company that supports young people at risk, and the Yeovil branch is based in a restored historic building, so it sounds like we could have a good visit!

In between getting that organised, I got carried away researching infographics, as a possible way of getting the young people to engage with the heritage of the building and Langport, and provide some interesting and accessible heritage interpretation displays at the church and on the website.  (Other CCT churches have information boards and leaflets which have lovely branding and design but aren't too enticing to stand and read).   I started looking at coolinfographics.com, and got recommended good.is/infographics (which has some supercool examples of interactive infographics, which I'd like to at least try and include on our website), but then completely by chance found this example - which shows a heritage touring map of the South West! Topical.

Tidying things up

Today was a lot less exciting than yesterday, it was mostly spent tidying up and calming down all the stuff that was produced frantically yesterday, updating contact sheets, clearing out all the old drafts of documents, the sort of stuff you employ a PA to do...

Having said that, this afternoon Melita made a most interesting discovery - there is a project going on in Bristol right now that features a historic building, youth consultation and redevelopment into a youth facility! Not quite the same aims as our project but still very useful to know about (and learn from).

This is the Old Fire Station, in the centre of Bristol, soon to be 'The Station', up-to-the-minute youth hub for all things young.  They found out in February that they were going to receive an whopping £5.75 million grant to redevelop and fit out an old station building into a youth facility.  I think we can definitely learn some lessons here!

It's also a leading contender for a Go&See - its not too far to get a minibus to from Langport, its at an interesting stage of the development (it won't be completed until 2012, but exciting things are happening already), and My Place who are in charge are very experienced with working with young people, hopefully they'll agree to let us have a look and ask some questions! Hooray!

Productivity! Whooooosh!

I have been very productive today, Melita even said so, which made me happy.

The ball is well and truly rolling on making first contact with the young people, (I know they're not actually aliens, but they are 18yr olds...) and Annie who is a Langport Youth Worker.  There is a meeting lined up for the 10th March which will be kind of crucial for getting the young people's first impressions of the project right... no pressure!

Once we'd got that worked out yesterday, Melita and I started working on the session plans for meetings with the core group of young people - how we were going to get from introductions to the project to a written and agreed funding application.  Its exciting, there's even talk of an application Wrap Party (like what they have in '30 Rock', only a slightly smaller scale).

I have also been researching what kind of checks we need and registers we need to sign up to so that we're 100% ok working with young people and/or vulnerable adults, and they're 100% ok working with us.  Important stuff!

A lot of the rest of the day was spent looking at inspirational websites that we can use for the project.  These can be inspirational in terms of web-design, for our ideas on how to develop our Project Development Website, inspirational in terms of exemplar heritage, youth, or regeneration projects, or just inspirational in that they have some useful links and contacts.  It's a document that is growing fast!