Blaby Library Community Project
This year marks our second year of NPO activity, and we are excited to be working in Blaby Library.
We have had a very busy few months, with our wonderful creative practitioner Jessi planning and running workshops throughout October, November and December:
Thistly Meadow Primary School
The Year 6 class really stepped up to the challenges that Jessi set for them! The class achieved so much during their workshops, including:
- Discussing and choosing the locations for the stop on our Story Trail
- Debating the choices for the main character and deciding on ‘Ollie the Owl’
- Taking a walk to visit each of the stops to gain inspiration for our story
- Deciding on a character for Ollie the Owl to interact with at each stop
- Working in small groups to write a segment of the story for every location and
- presenting them to the class
- Drawing their characters and using paint to bring them to life
Countesthorpe Academy
A small group of young talented young picked then picked up the story from the Y6 class and used their ideas, stories and art to develop the characters further. The group produced some amazing artwork over four workshops that included:
Finding out about the characters, locations and stories that the Thistly Meadow children decided on
- Taking a tour of the Story Trail to gain understanding of the details that needed to be considered when further developing the characters
- Sketching initial designs for their characters
- Refining their characters and adding colour
- Experimenting with adding Augmented Reality to their art
- Learning about the career of an artist and creative practitioner through a presentation from Jessi
Our nest steps involve the Blaby Community, with open workshops at the library for families to attend and create their own art for the background to our trail.
Community Participation Workers within the Culture Leicestershire team manage the work of Creative Practitioners, providing support, direction, and advice. Stephanie Strange is the Community Participation Worker managing this project. Please email or call with any informal enquiries: stephanie.strange@leics.gov.uk 0116 3058760.
Co-creation is always at the heart of every project we undertake, and we decided at our first working group meeting at the library to take this one step further, and involve the community in choosing the focus of our project.
We identified four potential projects and then ran a consultation for 3 weeks, asking the public to choose from the four options. The survey closed on Saturday 10th August, after the Project Lead (Community Participation Worker) and the Blaby Library Supervisor attended the very busy Blaby Summer Fun Day.
We had 230 results in total, with a great mix of library users and non-users:
- 30 from social media
- 85 from the library
- 120 from the Blaby Summer Fun Day
The first question we asked was ‘Which project would best serve the Blaby community? As you can see, the Story Trail was the clear winner, with the Game Group and AR Art project receiving a similar amount of votes.
Interestingly, these results changed considerably for the second question, which was ‘Which project would you most likely get involved with?’. The AR art project jumped up significantly, with the Story Trail dropping a smaller amount.
At our following working group meeting, as a result of the findings from the survey, we decided to move forwards with the Story Trail project, incorporating elements of Augmented Reality Art (the scale of this will be dependent on budget).
Our next steps are to investigate the costs involved in the AR elements, start developing partnerships and write draft artists briefs so we are ready to recruit as soon as final decisions are made. We will then commission a creative practitioner from the creative sector to facilitate and deliver the project. We envision workshops and activity will take place in the library from October onwards with the trail launched by the end of March 2025.
Watch this space for updates as they happen!