The Limelight!

On Sunday the New Saints were at All Saints Langport to be filmed!  This was for a new promotional video, being made by the Regeneration Taskforce at the CCT.

It is a sign of very good things to come for All Saints Langport, as the film is only being made about the best, most interesting, and most promising of the Regeneration Taskforce's projects, and right from the start, the youth empowerment and regeneration project at Langport was on the cards!  There were a lot of new skills to learn that day - being interviewed on camera isn't as easy as it looks!

Joe’s thoughts about the filming….

I really enjoyed my filming experience for the CCT Regeneration Taskforce DVD..  The camera crew were a great laugh and a pleasure to work with;  all though having three stranger’s, a camera and lots of bright lights shining in my face was rather intimidating.  I almost felt like I was being questioned by the police.  I’m happy I attended though as I’ve never worked with a professional film crew before and it was very interesting.

Charlotte's thoughts about the filming….

I was super nervous when we started but the film crew we’re lovely and very good at what they did, which made the process a little easier! All in all I would never have expected to be doing this kind of thing, it was an amazing experience and a great example of the new experiences I have come in to contact with by taking part in New Saints in Langport.

Grant’s thoughts about the filming….

I really enjoyed our filming adventure. It was great experience to meet the film crew and see the work that they do. They were very friendly and dedicated to what they do. I found the interview was quite intense and interesting. This was defiantly a great life skill to build and I’m sure there will be many more opportunities in future. It allowed time to also reflect on the journey we have all taken so far but also what will be achieved in the future. 

Once the videos finished I'll be able to post it on here so that you can see what we're talking about!

I'm looking forward to reflecting back on this experience in 5 years time and seeing how different the people, the building and Langport are.

Exciting updates and plans for the future!

Hello blogreaders,

Please forgive me for not updating the blog as frequently as I would like to have done recently.  It's testament to the progress of the project that I literally haven't had time over the past few weeks, everything seems to be happening in a pre-holidays rush!

So, exciting updates:

Keys:
The CCT have agreed with our suggestion that making one of our New Saints members an official keyholder for All Saints church will show that the CCT believe in the whole 'youth empowerment, giving young people responsibility and trusting them'.  The project has been designed from the start so that the young peoples' involvement doesn't remove anything that the church was providing already (for example, whatever combination of new uses, the building will remain consecrated and available for worship), so rather than take the keys from another local keyholder, the CCT are investing in a new set just for us!

Noticeboard:
We have been working for a while on a plan to replace the current noticeboard outside the church with a bigger, shinier, new one.  This will be a good, early, physical change to the building that will show followers of the project that we mean business, that we're proud of our community's building, and that we want to make it an inviting place to be used by the community once more.  These plans are going ahead with the knowledge and approval of the parish council.

Cinema Night:
...and speaking of the building being used once more.  The next event that New Saints are managing is a cinema night at the church (probably at the end of January).  We don't have all the details ironed out just yet, but the idea is to bring people into the building that might not have been in before, for a fun family film; but also so that the community can meet the New Saints in our official roles, put faces to names that they've seen in our newspaper articles.  The public events will also be a good opportunity for New Saints to continue speaking to the local community about ideas they have for the future uses of the building. 

Abseil:
New Saints had a very exciting meeting recently with the Fundraising Officer at the CCT, to look at the possibility of holding a sponsored abseil down the tower at All Saints.  The professionals went up and had a look and gave us a thumbs up in their risk assessment.  The CCT have held a good few sponsored abseils in the past and they've always been very popular (and raised a lot of money).  This event will take a while to plan, but that also means that our intrepid abseilers will have a long time to raise money! (get in touch if you want to abseil and raise money too!)

HLF Application:
Last week was a momentus occasion in New Saints history, we sent off our Heritage Lottery Fund application to be read through by our HLF contacts.  If we succeed with this funding application (and we'd like to think we will) we'll be able to hold many more events over the next two years, to celebrate the heritage of the building and it's links with Langport, open the building to visitors, tourists and the local community, build the capacity of the New Saints so that events in future run so smoothly and have much more communication with that community that will be using the building after the regeneration so we can work together on defining the new uses.  Good times!

Constituting Ourselves:
As you may have seen from excited tweets on our twitter, the New Saints are making great steps forward to constitute ourselves.  This means that we'll have much more power to make decisions quicker, we'll also be a more attractive offer to funders when we ask for support, and the group will have much more independency from the CCT (for example, having our own bank account).  We haven't yet finalised what sort of formal group we'll be, but hopefully that's a decision for our next meeting and we can keep moving forward from there!

So, that's a lot to digest, isn't it!  Keep checking back for updates :)

Take Art ... up the hill to All Saints

On Saturday we invited ourselves along to a Take Art event, part of the Made In Somerset programme which saw a whole day of performance arts workshops happening in Langport.

Originally, we'd wanted to offer our building as a venue for one of their events during the day, but we got in touch just a little bit too late...
...fortunately the organiser, Sarah, was very interested in our project and the effect it will have (and is having) in Langport, and welcomed the idea of us giving a 5-minute presentation at the end of their day. 

We were able to share information about the project, talk about the building, and the ways we will be connecting with the community to learn about the options for new uses.  After the presentation we invited anyone who was still interested (at the end of their long day of performing!) up the hill to have a look around the building.

The response was very positive and we made some very useful connections!  As well as being able to open the building to new visitors the event also served to give some of the New Saints more experience with speaking to members of the public.  We even managed to entice some of them onto our email-newsletter mailing list!

Speaking of which, newsletter number 2 is in the works, keep an eye out and get in touch if you want to join the mailing list!

Bad News and Good News for the project

Bad News
Yesterday I heard from my CCT colleagues that our building, All Saints Langport, had become the victim of lead theft.  Lots of historic buildings, especially churches have lead roofs...

Anyone who's read a newspaper in the last 10 years will know that lead theft from church roofs is becoming an increasingly common problem in the UK due to the price of metals like lead increasing rapidly as other less stable commodities drop in the recession.

Anyone who also works for the CCT will know that some CCT churches are seen to be more at risk because they don't have regular activities in them, a sophisticated (and expensive) roof alarm, or a local community around them to put the thieves off.  None of these are true of All Saints Langport, but it explains the empathetic reaction I got from other members of staff.

Whilst very upsetting and frustrating (it's proving very difficult not to take it personally, or for New Saints as a group to see it as a personal affront), this also provides an opportunity.  The local community have already, since hearing, proven vocal about their passion for the building, and we can use this expression to produce something active and positive.  We are planning to include a 'lead theft awareness' event as part of a larger (and much more fun) series of events in an HLF Application.  This will show legacy, community activism and passion from the New Saints to the community (and the HLF), to show that we're serious about what we're doing.

Good News
On a much, much brighter note, I got an email this morning saying that our first attempt at a funding application has been successful!
Do you remember ages and ages and ages ago when we applied for money from Somerset Crimebeat to provide New Saints with portable office equipment including laptops, memory sticks and a digital camera? Well, we've finally got the result (a good lesson in waiting and waiting and waiting to hear from grant funders).

This will be a huge positive boost to the project as it means we can do effective training on social media (I wouldn't be surprised if this blog started getting more than one contributor), have a much more digital approach to meetings and site visits, and ensure much more regular and efficient communications within and from New Saints!

Wooooooo :D

Who are we?

Last night we had an amazingly productive meeting (that went on an hour longer than scheduled and meant that I got home at 11pm after starting work at 9am! *stretches and yawns*) where we defined roles and responsibilities for the members of New Saints.

We've done this now, rather than at the start because it's given the CCT a chance to get to know the New Saints members in relation to the project (see Blog Statements), and it's given our members the chance to sample elements of different roles, find out what they enjoyed and what they didn't enjoy, and make a consciously competent decision about what roles they would like to have in the project.

Having said that these roles aren't set in stone - if a member of New Saints isn't the 'Historic Investigator', they're not forbidden from digging up some juicy social history about Langport (there's a lot, we've checked!).  Similarly, if the Communications Manager isn't enjoying being Comms Manager, then we can all shift and change and take different responsibilities.

So,
Events Managers - Alice and Tadgh
Buildings Manager - Tadgh
Design and Branding - Charlotte
Historic Investigations - Joe W
Techie - Joe F
Communications - Mark
Advisor/Observer/Mentor - Melita

Our other current members, Paige and Grant haven't yet been assigned specific roles, however they still play a valuable part in decision-making at meetings, and can take part in any of the roles or work out their own.

Langport Funday

On Sunday we had our first public presence, as part of the Langport Funday.  Even though this wasn't our own event, it was still very important for the project as it was the first time some local people had heard about the project.  We all know how imporant first impressions are! It was also a nice warm-up for New Saints' Event Management skills before we embark on our very own events in Langport. 

Our presence at the event included one of the stalls on the Rec - from this we were giving out leaflets (see below), signing people up to our e-newsletter, doing facepainting and selling cupcakes to the crowds. All of which went down very favourably, hooray!

  

 We also took the opportunity to have the church itself obviously open to visitors and got a very healthy 21 people into the church.  This was a real triumph as it meant we could speak to locals and tourists about our project whilst standing in the space that it involved.

All in all, a very good (if soggy) day for all of us.

We have our New Saints Logo!

And this is it:

We managed to get it sorted just in time for the first event where we go public (but I think that deserves it's own blogpost later).  From this whole logo, we are also going to use different elements in different parts of our branding, so for instance, this monogram:

... can be used on letterheads and business cards, whereas this derivation of the logo:

... can be used on funding applications and other formal documents.

The logo design has come a long way over the last few weeks, here are some of the previous drafts:

 

It'd be great to have some feedback, what do you think?