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What's new at CTDU?

August 2005!

Equality Matters project

CTDU wins local volunteer awards

CTDU wins newcomer garden competition

Make Poverty History

Networking trips to Edinburgh

Management committee meetings

Participatory Video Training for Trainers

Disability Awareness Group training

Participatory Action Research

Bothkennar garden development

Equality Matters project The training and development worker post for our new project 'Equality Matters' funded by the Falkirk Community Planning Partnership has been advertised and we are hoping to appoint a new worker on 23rd August 2005. The Equaity Matters project aims to encourage and enable more people from marginalised communities to be involved in community organising and campaigning. It is designed to help communities develop an autonomous voice to communicate with their members and represent them, participate effectively in community planning structures, make presentations, deliver equality training programmes, and run campaigns. The project will: strengthen grassroots organisations develop participants skills for collective action increase the presentation skills, media skills and resources available to communities to present themselves positively improve the image and assertiveness of marginalised communities enable participants to think critically and creatively about the roots of inequality increase participants knowledge of and access to equalities legislation increase networking and collaboration across the equalities spectrum. What will the Equality Matters programme look like? We will meet small numbers of volunteers and activists through our initial investigation who we will offer our Equality Matters Programme to with the initial aim of supporting and encouraging their work and helping them attract more people to join them in their community endeavours. The programme we deliver will be designed in dialogue with participants to suit their needs and interests but is likely to include the following topics: Poverty and inequality in Scotland The image and self esteem of disadvantaged communities Community development, community regeneration and community planning Skills for community organising Skills for participation in community planning Getting heard as a community - using the arts to raise your profile and take control of your public image Community dialogue processes Participatory Action Research and reading statistics Presentation and group facilitator skills Conflict resolution Fundraising Campaigning For more information about our new project, see Equality Matters on our projects page, or telephone Fiona or Rosemary at CTDU 01324 832040 email Fiona or Rosemary
Newcomer garden award Students are delighted that we have won a Newcomer Garden award in a competition organised by Falkirk Council community services and supported by the new Torwood Garden Centre! The award ceremony will be on 8th November 2005 at Falkirk Council. Two students have been invited to collect the award on behalf of the student association. Well done everyone who's been involved in the garden project. Work on the garden continues through the summer with regular development days. Later in the year we plan to get Tansy Lee Moir to facilitate some workshops and create a CTDU mosaic for the garden.
CVS Falkirk and District Volunteer Awards 2005

On 11th June 2005 CTDU won a runner up prize for 'Volunteer Engaging Organisation of the year.

Benefits to our students from CTDU training: Students are more confident, and are able to put their skills and knowledge to use benefitting both CTDU and the communities they are involved with. For example,
CTDU students have become involved in committee work, taken on office bearer roles, studied for an HNC in Community Work, taken up a role on the Care Commission committee, and led workshops on topics such as banner making and disabilty issues.

We are also delighted that our volunteer Finlay Currie won the Volunteer of the Year award.

Our organisation works with a wide range of people from different communities of interest - mental health groups, people with a learning disabilities, disabled people, people living in social exclusion.

Finlay has grasped the opportunity to be involved in the committee work and physical tasks and goes about his voluntary work with a sensitive and positive attitude towards a very mixed community.

Finlay's countless hours of work has saved CTDU a lot of money, which means money can go towards our programmes for our members.

Make Poverty History

17 students were amongst the estimated 225,000 people who marched in Edinburgh on 2nd July 2005 to Make Poverty History.

CTDU students took our 'Make Poverty History' banner.

Everyone had a gr8 day - as you can see by the photos!

Networking trips to Edinburgh

Pilton, Edinburgh

George Lamb, a community worker who works in Pilton is running a programme for disabled people to help them do more campaigning. George was very impressed by all our students when he came to our AGM in November - so in April he asked CTDU to go to Edinburgh to visit the Pilton Partnership Project. On 24th August, George and the group will come through to visit CTDU's students and see our centre and students will show some of our videos and banners.

Craigmillar, Edinburgh

CTDU students visitrf the Craigmillar Capacity Building project to tell them more about CTDU's work on 27th July 2005. See pictures below. All the students had a great time - thanks to Mike who came through and picked us all up in the minibus - and our audience enjoyed hearing about CTDU.

CTDU's Board of Directors

Staff and management committee will meet for a CTDU development day facilitated by Joette Thomason on Monday, 22nd August 2005

The date of our Annual General Meeting this year is 25th November 2005 and the venue is St Mungos RC Church Hall, Mar Street, Alloa.

The next meeting of the board of directors wiill be held at Bothkennar Centre for Citizen Education on
Friday,16th September 2005 at 1.30 p.m.

Dates of previous meetings;
Friday, 28th January 2005 at 1.30 p.m.
Thursday, 10th March 2005 at 1.30 p.m. Task group meeting at 10.00 a.m.
Thursday, 28th April 2005 at 1.30 p.m.
Thursday, 7th July 2005 at 1.30 p.m.
Staff and management committee development day, 25th July 2005
Friday, 5th August 2005 at 1.30 p.m.

Participatory Video Training for Trainers course

Participatory Video empowers individuals and communities to use film in order to share ideas and experiences. With simple techniques and in a short time, people and communities can be trained in basic film-making skills to identify and analyse important issues in their community and/or personal life. Replaying and editing their experiences opens up safe and structured spaces for people to explore these issues. Finally, screening finished works creates space for voices to be heard of people and communities that have previously been misunderstood or ignored.

In April 2005 students took part in a short course to train in the use of filmmaking equipment and then learn methods and techniques for training others, particularly people in marginalised communities. At the end of this training students:

• gained basic filmmaking skills
  
  
• learned the use of PV techniques to train others to use film
  
  
• made a short film using these techniques
  
  
• met many like-minded people committed to working with these methods on projects

PV project in Grangemouth:
Students have used their new skills to join in with a PV project with communities living around the Grangemouth industrial complex. The project used PV methods to enable community members to explore their experience of living with the local pollution from the Grangemouth facilities. The project began with the screening of video letters from a Brazilian community where the pollution from the Grangemouth plants are theoretically being 'soaked up' by planting trees there. However the planting of trees in the Brazilian community is in the form of huge monoculture eucalyptus plantations that are devastating local people's health and livelihoods. Therefore the two communities, separated by distance, language and culture are inextricably linked by global industrial pollution. The Grangemouth participants have created their own video letters in response the Brazilian films.

Dates for forthcoming meetings are:12th July 2005 at Bothkennar
First viewing of the Grangemouth films.

Contacts:
Local co-organiser: Fiona McKeown - email Fiona or telephone on 01324 832040
Trainers: Heidi Bachram at heidi@tni.org or telephone on 01865 240644

The course is run by Heidi Bachram and Ell Southern from the Participatory Action Centre, based in Oxford and co-organised by the Community Training and Development Unit (CTDU).

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Disability Awareness Group - Training

Fiona has been working with members of the Disability Awareness Group (DAG) to help them develop their own constitution and get funding to run training sessions. The group will hold their Inaugural Meeting at 10.45 a.m. to 11.45 a.m. on 14th July 2005 in the Whins Resource Centre, Alloa. If you would like to come along to this meeting please email Fiona or call her on 01324 832040

Recently DAG led a training session attended by 35 people where they showed the 'Wheelchair Challenge' video and led some practical exercises. Download a full report of the event (Acrobat Reader format) including the case studies and the discussions of the groups by clicking on the link below.

Contact Fiona if you'd like more information.

If you already have Adobe's Acrobat Reader on your computer you can just click the link below to get the report

Click here to download report

But you'll need to download Adobe's Acrobat Reader from the Adobe website if you aren't able to open the report. Just click on the link below.

click here to download Acrobat Reader

Participatory Action Research

CTDU members with a history of mental health problems have funding to progress their Participatory Action Research project.

The group has been working with research mentor Joette Thomas to design the research and prepare the first stages. The group recently heard that they've been successful in an application to progress the Participatory Action Research project.

The aim is to create awareness of the needs of people with mental health problems, so that their experiences can be considered in policy making, to improve services at a local level and build working relationships with local services. If you would like to be involved with the research, please email Fiona or telephone her on 01324 832040

Meetings planned for July and August:
13th July - taking stock of where we are so far
11th August - Listening skills and interview skills training
18th August - progressing the drama

We are very fortunate to be based in the beautiful setting of the RSPB Bothkennar reserve, a peaceful and interesting environment for our members to learn from and enjoy. RSPB are particularly interested in protecting the coastline and birds whose numbers have been falling rapidly. Tree sparrows and yellow hammers frequent our newly developed garden, and grey partridges and skylarks inhabit the fields behind the centre. Many other birds can be seen, particularly in autumn and winter.

Boat feature

Contact
Fiona
if you want to get involved.

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