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Director’s Blog – New recruits and business planning
It seems here at Creativity Works we have been recruiting now for months, but we have at last found two new pieces to our jigsaw and are looking forward to welcoming a new co|Create Manager and a new Finance Administrator to the organisation next week. We will be introducing them to you very shortly! The final piece of our jigsaw will be a new apprentice, and we are just finalising details with Norton Radstock College and the Local Enterprise Partnership for their recruitment. Details to follow…
Meanwhile, creating a business plan is always a lengthy and often painful experience. It also gives you time to reflect and to vision hugely ambitious ideas and projects for the future. I am caught this week between panic as the ACE deadline to hand in our business plan looms, and genuine excitement at some of the ideas we have brewing for the next few years. I have recently been reading the work of Darren O’Donnel, Artistic Director of Canadian company, Mammalian Diving Reflex. His words are not for the feint-hearted, but his creativity, imagination, wit and sense of social justice are extremely inspiring.
Our current work continues apace, with creative courses being delivered and peer-groups exploring their creative potential. We have recruited two amazing artists to start work on our Elders project ‘Home Service’, and ‘Ways and Means’, a fascinating project working with Adults with Learning Disabilities to create communication tools is now under way, in collaboration with Bath Locality Learning Disability Service and Sirona Health Improvement Service.
I have been busy taking part in some very interesting debates recently. Firstly, as part of The Ideas Club, a strand of the Pass It On commission in Wilts, the inspirational Jocelyn Cunningham chaired a debate asking the question, “What is it like to walk in others shoes?” A distinguished panel of artists, health professionals and community leaders discussed ideas of empathy, social change and walking as a metaphor for personal growth.
I then chaired a fascinating debate as part of the ‘Strike a Light Festival, produced by Theatre Bristol and the Battersea Arts Centre at the Olympus Theatre, Gloucester asking the question, “What role/responsibility do the arts have in portraying conflict?” With very much my theatre directors’ hat on, and someone enthralled by stories and representation of conflict, this was a remarkable and moving discussion made all the more lucid by the interventions of Dr Martin Hurcombe Reader in French Studies at the School of Modern Languages, University of Bristol.
On Saturday 11th at The Old Theatre Royal, I am talking as part of a panel at Theatre Bath’s Breaking Boundaries conference, discussing how mental health affects those working in the arts. Do come along if you are free, and as always please do keep in touch with us and let us know what you are up to.