My Current Work

My day job as Communications Assistant at Watershed means I am exposed on a daily basis to the ins and outs of the cultural industries. I deal with distributors, curators, producers, writers, artists, filmmakers, journalists, publishers, technologists and all the different departments of our own organisation. Every day I feel like I’m learning new things about how cultural ideas are dreamed up, funded, produced, brought to audiences, evaluated and more, and my work puts me in touch with all kinds of films, events and projects. I have helped with BFI Academy, as well as looked after a school screening, introduced one of our Summer holiday Gromit’s Movie Marvels films, as well as other activities. During this course, I hope to extend my knowledge of events and initiatives that relate to children and families, as well as arts participation/engagement in general.

My Intensions

I will research different groups and organisations in Bristol which run community/child/family engagement events that I am interested in, and will do so mainly by talking to people (especially Hannah Higginson and Vanessa BS at Watetshed, and Ellie Jeffs at Arnolfini) and looking online. I could volunteer my time or see if they have any specific placement programme/s that I can attend at weekends. Due to working full-time and organising the events, it will not be possible for me to commit to an internship or a long period of volunteering, but I intend to see what is out there. I will also consider if I can do any training as part of my professional development at Watershed and will talk to my line manager about this – I think this may be the best thing to do for me at this time because it will feed into my current work as well as my own interests. I will also meet with my course advisers to discuss my ideas, research and progress in organising my placement/training.

My Initial Research

Organisations, groups, individuals and events I can research for training/volunteering/placement include:

Wellspring Wellbeing Centre in Redfield. It is just a few minutes from my house and runs various arts initiatives for the local community. If I can volunteer with them then I would like to find out about their projects, funding, who goes to the arts activities, what they think about community building and outreach, how they evaluate/gather feedback, and how their work integrated with the other activities (e.g. health care) at the centre. There are also Kids Summer Holiday Circus Camps at Creative Commons which I could have helped with, and I could see if they have upcoming events like this. I could also volunteer at the Bristol Children’s Scrap Store.

Kumiko are creative freelancers working in the community doing workshops, courses and installations. For example there is Charlotte Chapman who co-runs Kumiko, and has done other projects in Bristol (StArt at St. Pauls) who I could contact about her work and see if I could go along and volunteer. There’s also Kids Company who work with vulnerable children in London and Bristol and Voscur which is Bristol’s Voluntary and Community Sector (they have a good course on in October called Writing Small Funding Bids which costs between £60 – £150). I am also interested in finding out about The Trinity Centre and the arts and wellbeing community projects and initiatives they run, as well as contacting M Shed to see if I could volunteer for them at a learning in the community event. I also know Kate Cox, who works as an Arts Therapist in Bristol. 

In addition, on Sat 9 Nov at Watershed we have an Afrika Eye children’s event, there is a family film screening and We Are Family event at Arnolfini on Sat 30 Nov, as well as a family art making session at Spike Island on Sat 6 Dec.

All of these people and events identified could help me to find out about what its like to work with families and communities in Bristol and below are some events I could attend at the weekends if I have time. If I cannot do much weekend volunteering then I will look to do it after this course is finished to gain some more experience in this field and will look into the Bristol Cultural Engagement Partnership.

What I Have Organised

I have organised two training days through work (one in London and one in Bristol) which will cover families and community engagement – perfect! I will meet peers from other organisations who share my interests, learn form industry professionals, hear some of the latest research in these fields and engage with case studies.

For the first training day I could choose between three different training events that have been especially commissioned for the Family Arts Campaign, each of which look at a different aspect of programming and engaging families. I was interested in the Make Yourself At Home – Getting The Welcome Right For Families (which is aimed at staff responsible for welcoming and increasing family audiences, and would help me to understand what it is about the visitor experience that leads to excellent family arts experiences) and the Get Families: Understanding The Dynamics & Needs of Today’s Family Audience And Creating The Right Messages For Them (which is for those responsible for planning and attracting families and would give me an overview of the research and learning that has been gathered regarding family audiences and how to adapt our marketing strategies to maximise reach and engagement with families). Of the two which were most relevant to me, I felt that the Get Families would be especially useful from both a communications and producer point of view (attracting a family audience, what they are like and what they want/need, how to engage and promote effectively). This training course will hopefully give me some pointers for how to tweak the Family Arts Festival events to be more family-friendly and to help me to reach a wider family audience as I will attend it before the festival kicks off.

The second training day was sent to me by my boss Louise Gardner (see email below). This CultureHive course will introduce me to the principles of effective and genuine community engagement, the values of this approach, as well as how to achieve organisational goals and long-term audience development. I am very excited about how this can impact my future work – I think it will give me an insight into lots of different projects and how they are run.

I also want to work a Cinekids event to gain some extra experience, but I am not sure which weekend I will be available (after the Family Arts Festival events are over and probably nearer Christmas).

I am very excited to be attending these events and I intend to make notes/take photos and then reflect on my experience in this blog post afterwards so that I can record what I am learning.

Training Day 1 – Family Arts Festival: Get Families training in London at TMA

On 9 October attended a training day called Get Families: Understanding The Dynamics & Needs of Today’s Family Audience And Creating The Right Messages For Them. It was fantastic to meet so many different people working in the arts and hear about their work, organisations, activities and audiences. I think it is sometimes easy to forget that there are lots of other ways of doing things when you work in such a dynamic and really quite big and busy place like the Watershed. The diverse mix of people I met was really eye-opening in terms of my own knowledge and understanding of the wider arts sector: on my table, for instance, there was someone who worked in schools and youth clubs in Sussex doing arts engagement, a young man who ran a tiny community theatre in an estate in the Chelsea area and a member of Arts Council England who had come to hear about the Family Arts Campaign and hear what other organisations had to say on the experience so far. Interacting with others from different organisations and backgrounds helped me to gain a deeper insight into the arts industries and I really felt like I was part of a wider community of arts practitioners. That was a very important development for me.

The course itself involved an introduction to families (we worked in groups to do a short questionnaire), information about how to make your organisation and events more family friendly, a guest speaker – founder of the family arts events reviews website Curious Mum (I am now a subscriber!) – and then there was a general question and answer session relating to our FAF events.

Here is a pdf of all my notes on engaging families at arts events (below is just a selection of screenshots and photos of the other information I received).

 

I learnt, amongst other things, about how varied a family unit can be in the UK today, that the market is expanding, that families tend to distinguish between a ‘trip’ (cheap or free) or a ‘treat’ (expensive) and that it helps if events can fall into one of these categories; that giving families as much information in advance is the best way to keep them happy at your venue and event, that the online and Box Office welcome for families is very important for families in particular because they have certain needs (e.g. parking, buggies, noise levels, baby change, food and bottles, will they be welcome by staff and other customers?); Tatiana from Curious Mum also talked about how to write copy for families and said that the more it can convey feelings (how will a parent/child feel at the event!?) and the more friendly and human it is, the more likely families are to attend the event.

I came away from the course feeling very informed about families and family friendly events, as well as inspired to pitch to Watershed in the near future about why we want to encourage families into the organisation (e.g. building sustainable audiences and creating quality cultural experiences that families can share with us, fitting in with Arts Council Great Art For Everyone message, as well as getting involved in a growing market). Later it would be fantastic if we could  really critique how family friendly our building and our website is, as well as start a focus group/collect and analyse feedback to find out what families really want/expect from us, what they like/don’t like and how they find out their information. I would do all of this with a view to doing family events connected to elements of our regular programme and/or festivals (e.g. a family event for Black History Month). I think this course will help me with my career path as I will be able to talk about this audience with greater confidence and knowledge, and it has already helped me to critique and clarify some of the ideas I had about this audience and this area of arts events.

Immediate things I will implement in the FAF events as a result of this course include:

– Adding more information to all our listings info and website info for each events and events as a whole (e.g. informing parents that the Tim Burton Alice in Wonderland before the Tea Party is a PG and what this means, as well as more information about timings and any catering),

– At the events themselves I will give families a clear breakdown of the event before we begin so they know what is happening and when and provide take-home materials, I will also talk to Box Office about our welcome (though I think they are great already!),

– Make the existing events copy more family-friendly, that is, tell the parents how this event is going to make them and their children feel (together and separately).

Additionally to the above, meeting and speaking with Tatiana, who set up Curious Mum, and finding out that her background is in marketing and branding, gave me additional confidence to follow my desire to work in this field. I think that this element is incredibly important for family events in particular and I love her website! I would love to make a similar one for Bristol organisations/events…

Further Inspiration 

At the Get Families training day I learnt about Rich Mix Cinema and Arts Centre in Bethnal Green, East London. Rich Mix is a charity and social enterprise that offers live music, film, dance, theatre, comedy, spoken word and a range of creative activities for people of all ages and all cultures. All their profits go back to support their education, arts and community activities which nurture new and local talent – much like Watershed, which is a social enterprise. When I next go to London I will arrange to visit them and talk to them about areas of their activity which really interests me: projects like Ladies Who Learn which RichMix Hosts, their dynamic programme of events for under 25s which includes regular spoken word poetry and dance, their events which celebrate different cultures such as Chinese New Year, as well as their series of family friendly events, which includes a regular Pan African family event which includes film, music, poetry, and food. Their cross-art form approach really interests me and I’d like to find out about how they produce the above programmes, their audience development practice and their position in the community, as well as how the organisation operates as a cinema and arts centre in general. They have an internship position (Film Programmer Assistant) open at the moment, but it is unpaid. I will keep an eye out for opportunities to visit them and see what they do in the new year.

Reading about Rich Mix inspired me to look closer to home. In Bristol I found out about an amazing project that The Cube, a small independent cinema run entirely by volunteers, ran back in 2010 after the earthquake in Haiti. Kids Kino was run by the Nanoplex arm of the cinema, which is the youth and family programme at there which aims to encourage active learning and creativity, and provide opportunities for young people to help build and create their own culture. The Cube volunteers hosted Nanoplex workshops, cabarets, film screenings and gigs to pay for the Haiti Kids Kino project. The Haiti project included two volunteers from the cinema going to Port Au Prince to project films on buildings and tents, while giving camera’s to children to explore their own lives, less than a month after that year’s devastating earthquake. The idea was to share the experience of making and watching films with the locals, while offering temporary childcare. I think it was a fantastic project.

At the moment they are very busy trying to get people to donate to save the building and I cannot see any recent or current Kids Kino/Nanoplex projects. Perhaps once they have secured the building (which I really hope they do!), they will do another project like this. I know that a projectionist at Watershed volunteers there so I could talk to him in more detail about future opportunities.

Training Day 2 – The Essentials of Community Engagement course at Tobacco Factory, Bristol

On 21 Nov I attended this Audience Agency/CultureHive run course on effective community engagement, which especially focussed on how to identify successful approaches to reaching people that you are currently ‘unconnected’ with (I think this could be families at Watershed) and explored strategies for connecting with wider agendas (and generally a more diverse audience at Watershed). I feel that I can apply learning gained from the numerous case studies we looked at from the arts and heritage sector to my own current and future work.

Here is a pdf of all my notes on community engagement (below is just a selection of screenshots and photos of the other information I received).

  

Observations and insights which I have gained from this very interesting day-long include principally learning a lot more about how to approach these kind of projects (lots of planning, really careful budgeting alongside a lot of flexibility) and this kind of arts practitioner role (don’t let yourself feel isolated within an organisation because you are quite outward facing and often alone, and keep feeding back into the organisation what you’re doing and reflecting on how your work impacts on the organisation and vice versa). It also gave me lots of inspiration for the types of events and organisations I would like to be involved in and made me aware of challenges I may face when we looked at case studies; it also cemented in my mind that to do this work you have to be committed, creative, hands-on and a people person; it re-iterated the importance of evaluation in community engagement projects (identifying the key beneficiaries, objectives and performance indicators); as well as taught me some basics about funding.

I especially enjoyed when Emily Bull from The Station gave a presentation about the venue, how they came about and now operate, how they involve local young people in the decision making and running of the place, what other services and projects they offer, and the relationships they have with different organisations and groups within Bristol. Emily also talked about her career path and how she got to where she is now , and I felt I could really relate to her and it gave me confidence in myself and my choice of career path as I would love to work with someone like this.

In terms of my future career path, this training day really inspired me to investigate my love of installation art, dance, mural painting and illustrating to think about community projects which I could potentially set up in the future (as a volunteer). It has also helped me to think about how we might try to engage with harder to reach audiences at Watershed – it is so true that having a respected voice in the community or someone you know recommend a place or an event to you, makes you much more likely to go. I think that this is something we need to work on as an organisation in the areas where there aren’t many people who know our brand, work or what we do. The best form of marketing is word of mouth and I think if we could work on this in the communities and areas of Bristol who we don’t engage with as much as we might want to, then it could really make a difference.

Other work experience

In December I helped out with a Cinekids Animation Workshop (Cinekids: Animating Faces Out of Bits and Bobs) which was run in association with Cinecity Brighton and voice-over artist Tom. The workshop was part of BFI Gothic season at Watershed and was inspired by the work of Czech filmmaker and animator Jan Svankmajer who made a short film using stop motion animation where bits and bobs make up a pair of heads which proceed to eat each other and then vomit up the other to make a new head, made up of new objects. Pretty weird stuff – but the kids loved it! Whilst the kids were at the workshop their parents were able to watch a rare collection of Svankmajer’s Gothic inspired shorts (which are rated certificate 18) and so it was a great mix of adult and kids entertainment.

The most important part of my job was attaining consent forms from the parents, looking after the children throughout the workshop and helping them to use the equipment. There were a few times where I had to help with group dynamics, but otherwise the children were fantastic and just really energetic and excited. Some of them had been before to our Cinekids workshops in the summer so were familiar with the equipment and the processes and others were new. We began the workshop with a short introduction to ourselves, Tom the artist, stop-motion animation and the Svankmajer short.

The children had so many great ideas, the most challenging thing was trying to get the whole group to follow through with a few of the ideas and not just jump from one thing to the next. I also thought throughout that it doesn’t really matter if their story doesn’t make sense, as this is supposed to be a session for total creative freedom and not for learning ‘how it should be done’. They finished pieces were definitely experimental (but so is Svankmajer!). Watch the videos I helped them to make here.

 

I especially enjoyed meeting the families of the children involved, they were so happy when we screened their animations at the end of the session and I enjoyed hearing all the kids’ different ideas. It was a bit of a tough workshop as we had more children than normal (it sold more tickets than it was supposed to) so it felt a bit cramped and there was lots of mess to clear up – all those bits and bobs!

It was nice working with Tom and Maddy on this workshop (there I am in the back of the photo on the right hand side) and I will try to do similar work again. I emailed around to the families who attended the workshop with the link to their video about a week later (see screenshot below) – it’s important to do that kind of aftercare, say thank you and you can let them know of any relevant upcoming events as well.

I would love to do workshops like this all the time and so in terms of helping me with my future career aspirations, it was another good experience of how to run a children’s workshop and how to produce one with the help of an artist.

Summary of my training, learning, and impact on my future career

I have really enjoyed gaining more experience in my interest areas and I am looking forward to gaining more. Doing the two course days has been really lucky and invaluable experience, and I find I respond really well to this kind of training. I feel like I have learnt a lot about the groups I would like to work with, the types of work I would like to do, the roles available and necessary skills to do them, information on funding, and about programming and producing successful events for families and in communities with a variety of different groups. Working the Cinekids workshop was really good hands-on experience and taught me that getting out there and volunteering for things will be a great way for me to learn about how to run the kinds of events and projects I am interested in. It will also help me to make the necessary contacts to learn more and progress in my career. For example, in February I will have arranged to help at a friend’s charity fundraising event in Southville for LinkAge during the children’s workshops and I would like to do more of this for events and initiatives that relate to children and families, as well as arts participation/engagement in general in the near future.