What's new at CTDU?
March 2007!

CTDU associates event - Clackmannanshire, April 2007

Clackmannanshire Learning Network events

Falkirk Learning Network events

What happens at a Learning Network event?

Management committee meetings

Recent Events- update

CTDU Winners!

Participatory Action Research - update

CTDU: It Does What It Says On The Tin

Getting Heard

Disability Awareness Group

Bothkennar garden development

CTDU Associates

Doing What You Do - Only Better!

CTDU associates

Taster day on 27 April 2007 Coalsnaughton Village Hall.

Doing What You Do - Only Better looked at using the arts to help you work through a useful evaluation process in a creative and enjoyable way.

The workshop was led by CTDU Associate workers Jean Bareham and Jan Nimmo.


Jean led the morning session on evaluation process. In small groups we evaluated our journey to the training day, decided on indicators eg traffic, scenery, stress levels for a good or bad journey and then judged our journey using a scale of 1 to 5.

Then we were asked to draw our journey to give a more visual presentation and decide if drawing the journey highlighted any problems that had been missed using the scale.

Jean stressed the importance of being rigourous and showing that you have been scientific.

Freire's model:

What? .....happened
Why? ......did it happen?
So What?.. bring it together
Now What? ... Action Plan

In the afternoon Jan showed us a range of art methods that are useful in evaluation e.g PowerPoint presentations, video, and in the last hour we made a banner which participants decided to call 'evaluate this' to show that art can give form to feelings.

Some comments from participants evaluation of the day were:

I left with lots of inspiration which I hope to share with the team, young people, parents and volunteers.

Really useful day in all aspects, I'm delighted I came and will definitely use all I learned.

Today was very useful on thinking through the whole evaluation process rather than just gathering evidence.

How important evaluation is for future funding.

Better understanding of evaluation process, it has been a positive learning experience.

I have new ideas and learned that arts can be a tool for evaluation.

Clackmannanshire's Regeneration Communities
Update on CTDU's Learning Network event on 15th March!

13 people participated in the learning network event.

In the morning we had a really interesting presentation from Arrun from the Clackmannanshire Youth Forum. Well done all the young folk involved in the making of their video - it's fantastic!

After a great buffet lunch thanks to CTDU volunteer Ann, and a bit of networking, everyone joined in a workshop on Community Banners led by CTDU associate worker Jan Nimmo. Most of us took a bit of persuading to get going with our 'artwork' but we were soon cracking on with the job and enjoying working on the task.

Jan showed us how we community banners can communicate ideas, values and aims through images and symbols that can cross language barriers and involve people of different abilities. We discovered that banner making can be a great exercise in team building, skills sharing, and confidence building. Everyone worked very hard to create a banner around the topic of Community Spirit Jan's taken away the banner to finish it off because we ran out of time to iron on all the symbols, so we'll update the site with the completed banner picture as soon as it's ready.

Falkirk's Regeneration Communities
Update on CTDU's Learning Network event on 20th March 2007!

17 local activists participated at this network event.

We started the event with an interesting presentation from the Public Participation Forum and Community Health Partnership. This group of ordinary people has been very helpful to the Parents of Children with Special Educational Needs (SEN) group that CTDU has been supporting. They have helped to promote the SEN group's DVD to different services. The SEN groups DVD raises awareness of the little things people can do that really make a difference and help children with additional support needs.

One of the key messages from the presentation by the Public Participation Forum was to encourage all members of the public to go along to local community health partnership meetings and give their views or suggest how improvements can be made on the health service. So watch your local paper for adverts of meetings in your area.

Next Alex Staerck, CTDU Associate worker. led a taster workshop called 'Who are We' . Alex had us all moving about and working hard! Two groups had to describe what their group did, what their aims are to another two groups. The only snag was the groups weren't allowed to tell their groups name! Thanks Alex, the workshop was great fun, but also serious because we all realised that we need to be thinking about our image and how we present ourselves.

After a great lunch (thanks Ann!) CTDU Associate worker Tansy Lee Moir led us through a workshop on Community Banner on the theme of Community Spirit (see above for information about banner making). Thanks to Tansy's pre-workshop preparation of the banner and some of the background images, we created a banner in one hour! That's got to be a record ...

CTDU's Learning Network events

Our Equality Matters projects run regular Learning Network events in Falkirk and in Clackmannanshire.

What's it all about .....

• we want to support and encourage people who are active in community groups in Regeneration areas

• 
  
  we want to enable communities to network, work together and strengthen their voice
  
  

• 
  and we have created a forum for learning, exchanging information and ideas
  

Learning Network events are a chance to .....

• have a bite and a blether, and to meet new people
  

• get your voice heard
  
  

• share ideas, and get useful information
  

Creative community engagement

Tansy said that arts are really useful for

• consulting local people about what issues concern them;
• gathering ideas and information to inform a decision making process;
• publicising what your organisation does, or is planning to do;
• building the skills and capacity of groups to enable them to participate in their community; and for
• developing networks of individuals or organisations.

Everyone got a chance to learn through making their own 'mushroom' decorated with words that describe their big aims, and then wrote what they needed to help them make that happen on 'roots'. The collection of mushrooms and roots showed how networks can help us achieve or goals.

Download our Clackmannanshire Equality Matters leaflet

Our next Learning Network event is on Thursday, 15th March 2007. Download an invitation here.

We have had 3 Learning Network events for Falkirk communities.

In our first event in February participants enjoyed a workshop on Forum Theatre with Morven Gregor of the Birds of Paradise Theatre Company; and

at the second event in August Liz Law from the Scottish Centre for Non-violence led participants in a workshop entitled 'Dealing Creatively with Conflict'.

Download our Falkirk Equality Matters leaflet

What happens at Learning Network events?

The programme for each event includes:

• an opportunity for community members to talk about what they have been doing;
• an opportunity for other agencies to pass on useful information to community groups;
• lunch and a chance to chat and get to know one another;
• and a participatory workshop

Our next Learning Network will be on Tuesday, 20th March 2007 and you can download an invitation here.

For more information about our Equality Matters projects:

• see Equality Matters on our projects page on this website
  
  
• or contact Fiona or Rosemary at CTDU 01324 832040 or email Fiona or Rosemary
  

Recent events

Annual General Meeting
On 30th November 2006 we held our AGM at Falkirk Town Hall. The event was attended by around 40 people and gave some of our students an opportunity to GET THEIR VOICES HEARD!

If you haven't received your copy of our annual report, you can view it online by clicking HERE! or phone 01324 832040 or email and we'll send you a copy in the post.

Free Training Events
Also on 30th November we held two free training events for volunteers and community activists in Falkirk regeneration areas. These were funded by Falkirk Community Planning Partnership, and included Introduction to the National Standards for Community Engagement with Iyaah Warren and Creative Community Engagement with Tansy Lee Moir. Around 30 people took up free places.

CTDU Winners!

CTDU has won the Volunteer Engaging Organisation of the Year Award 2006/7 at an award ceremony organised by Falkirk Volunteer Centre. We are very proud of our new cup as it recognises CTDU’s commitment to grassroots communities and equality of opportunity.

CTDU was runner up Volunteer Organisation in 2005. The cup is the second won by CTDU, as volunteer Finlay Currie won the Volunteer of the Year Award for Falkirk in 2005.

('Voices' Menu)

The aim of the work 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 your group would like to hear more about the research, please email Fiona or telephone her on 01324 832040

Voluntary Action Fund
Review of our 'Mentoring and Support' project

"CTDU: It does what it says on the tin"

It hardly seems possible that our Volunteers Mentoring and Support project, funded by the Voluntary Action Fund, has now come to an end. The project ran for 3 years from 2003 - 2006. During this year, volunteers who took part in the project have been working hard alongside CTDU Associate workers to review and find out in what ways volunteers have benefited from this project, and also how CTDU can best support volunteers in the Forth Valley in the future, and write a funding application for a new project.

Six volunteers undertook an intensive training programme including:

• Listening and note taking skills
• Interview techniques and setting interview questions
• How to engage with hard to reach groups, group work skills and techniques in facilitating groups
• Mapping exercise for real
• Using different methods to collect stories and deciding how to show these stories
• Report writing, looking at different ways to write a report, deciding on the best way for this group
  

Volunteers set up meetings with the various community groups/organisations, organised transport for volunteers to visit these groups, prepared questions, decided who will do what - ask questions, take notes or record responses on video and visited 7 community groups/organizations and filmed their interviews 'on location'. Then they researched funders, learned how to plan for funding applications and wrote a funding application. Through the outreach work volunteers made contact with 7 new community groups and organisations that we will work with under Equality Matters. CTDU will provide a practical and comprehensive package of training and development support to ensure that small organisations have the capacity to participate in regeneration and community planning initiatives.

"CTDU: It does what it says on the tin"

The DVD review the volunteers made "CTDU: It does what it says on the tin" is currently being copied. A volunteer has also made a review booklet. Copies are available.
Phone 01324 832040, or email Fiona or Rosemary.

Getting heard!

In 2005 CTDU students participated at the Glasgow 'Get Heard' event organised by the Poverty Alliance. Our students also presented their G8 banner.



Students talking about the G8

Following on from the Glasgow 'Get Heard' we were invited to participate at a 'Get Heard' event in London on 31st January. This event was organised to bring people experiencing poverty and social exclusion into the government's debate about tackling poverty.The Scottish contingent of 6 participants included our Ann and Fiona.

The event was part of a consultation by the UK Government, and the input of the participants will assist the the government to produce a National Action Plan on social exclusion, which will outline the key problems and approaches to tackling poverty and social exclusion.

In the pink ... Ann
(Not to be outdone) Lorraine participated at a conference in London on 7th February 2006 which was about people who work and are still living in poverty.


Cathy, Lorraine and Jim

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.

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 project

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. Both films had their first public screening in January 2006 at Falkirk Town Hall. Around 40 people attended the viewing and participated in a discussion about the films afterwards.

Contacts:

Forth Valley co-organisers:

Fiona McKeown - email Fiona or telephone Fiona at CTDU on 01324 832040Norman Philip - email Norman from the Living within the Glow project

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).

NEW!! download Guide to Video Letters - it's in Adobe Acrobat Reader format. (Click on Acrobat Reader format if you don't have that free programme installed on your computer already.)

A big THANK YOU to Norman for creating this great document.

Read people's reactions to the Video Screening in Falkirk 19th January 2006 - download report here.

Disability Awareness Group - Training

The Disability Awareness Group (DAG) recently 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

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.

Previous online news

November 2006

August 2006

April 2006

June to August 2005

March to May 2005

January to March 2005

Sept 04 to January 2005

April to Sept 2004