Office Day

The main task today was assisting with the collation of project monitoring forms; taking the information from them and displaying it on the Excel spreadsheet. This was quite a satisfying task, and allowed me to see the statistics of various Cartwheel projects that I have been involved in, including participant numbers and audience numbers.

It was a little challenging, as different people have different ways of filling out the monitoring forms, and different forms showed the information in different ways, so a bit of digging around was sometimes necessary to copy all the necessary information across.

Today I also photocopied the required amount of Proxy Voting Forms, minutes from the previous AGM, and directions to the venue of the upcoming AGM. 

Office Day

Amongst the usual mini-tasks of shredding, photocopying etc., I was asked to organise/update the Cartwheel Arts Office Manual. Previously, I hadn’t known this file existed, so it’s good to know that this point of reference is available should it be needed. I retyped pages with hand-written amendments, and generally organised the file. While updating the copies of company policies, ensuring the most recent version was present, I took the opportunity to read through them, as I had not looked at them since first applying for my Traineeship. It was useful to look at these again having gained experience working with Cartwheel, as I was able to see how they apply to real-life situations, why they are needed etc.

I also typed up minutes from a meeting about writing workshops, making things into full sentences where possible.  

Barnardos Art Club

Never having worked this closely with disabled children before, I was really looking forward to this session, and was not disappointed. This week at Barnardo’s Art Club, the first session (for 5-10 year olds) was dedicated to painting a giant Union Jack onto fabric, and the second session (11 – 19 year olds) was dedicated to making British themed decorations to stick onto it.

With the sessions running from 9:30, and me arriving at 10:00, I was thrown straight into the controlled-chaos that is children painting. By 12pm attentions had wavered from the crafts, and were redirected into indoor football, ping pong, paper plane making etc., so I gained a good range of experience with the kids.

The lead artist, Joanna Ricketts, is currently an Art Technician at Oldham College as well as a freelance artist. Since assisting Adel at Siddal Moor School for the Darnhill Festival parade decorations, this is a job I have been seriously considering, so it was fantastic to be able to talk to someone that has experienced this first hand, and to discuss the day-to-day duties etc. She was very positive about the role, and is obviously able to engage in other projects alongside this position, so I will be on the lookout for similar vacancies.

World Mental Health Day in Rochdale

Kerry and I ventured over to Rochdale to promote Cartwheel at the World Mental Health Day event in The Wheatsheaf Centre. We engaged people in the String of Change activity, in which participants thought about change in their life, wrote an example of this onto a triangle of paper, and then rolled this into a bead for the String. We filled the length of rope easily, as visitors were quite willing to get involved, and sometimes make more than one. Looking back it might have been nice to make the paper for participants write the changes on more co-ordinated, or make a pattern from the varying sizes of the beads to make it more visually appealing for when it is photographed. (Could still be possible to re-arrange the beads prior to this?)

I had never manned an informational-type stall before, and most people were chattier than when there’s the possibility you might try to sell them something. When visitors asked me questions about Cartweel’s projects/aims/history I was mostly able to answer them, which made me feel like a real part of the team and added a great feelgood factor to the day. 

Office and digital

Vik and I had a chat about ways of engaging participants on a more digital level, encouraging them to use the Cartwheel Facebook and Twitter accounts to their full potential as a way of information sharing.

Today I finished digitising the BACS records to date.