Blaby Library Community Project
This year marks our second year of NPO activity, and we are excited to be working in Blaby Library.
Having consulted with the Blaby community about what they would like to see in their local library and town, we thrilled to say that we have found the perfect Creative Practitioner that will make our ideas come to life! For more information about our quest to find the right project for Blaby, please scroll down ⬇
‘Jessi Illustrates’ will be our Creative Practitioner that will be co-create a Story Trail that will journey through the town of Blaby, incorporating an art element within the trail and project. Jessi has masses of experience co-creating art with children and families, developing trails in communities, and has designed interactive online games with groups in previous projects… so we are in very safe hands!
We are also VERY excited to announce that we will be working with Thistly Meadow Primary School to create our story, and help determine where our stops should be in Blaby. We have no doubt that the school’s Year 6 class will be up to the challenge! Workshops will be taking place throughout November.
Now that we have out story creators in place, our next job is to find out young artists who will be illustrating the trail and incorporating some exciting Augmented Reality into the trail! We are also talking with our partners within Blaby to make sure that we are creating a bespoke community trail- by the people of Blaby and for the people of Blaby.
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!