News
Goings on during summer and autumn 2024
Dear reader, welcome to our news round-up for summer-autumn 2024.
The Buxton Flowerpot Trail was a great success. With a theme of the Olympics and Paralympics, there were many amazing flowerpot creations of lots of different sports, countries and local heros. With 55 dots on the trail map, in all areas of Buxton, and more map sales than ever before, it was one of our most successful trails. Another THANK YOU to all those who took part and did the trail. It makes us happy. See photos of some of the creations on the project page here. We are currently trying to secure funding for next year’s trail, for which we have a grand plan, but more on this next year!
Our Changing Faces workshop continued to mid-July. Activities during the last half-term of the academic year included making marble runs/pasta crazy golf courses, spray-painting and finishing our grotesque masks and flowerpot creations. See some pictures here. We secured funding from Derbyshire County Council to continue the project into the 2024-2025 academic year. In September, we started working on another shadow puppetry film with activities including writing games, shadow play, poetry, drawing and design and puppet-making. We continue into the new year. Spaces are available if you’d like to refer a young person. Find out more about the project here.
Our big news for this summer, though, was the launch of a new project! High Peak Youth Robotics, for young people in the High Peak with an interest in engineering, coding, design and robotics, enabling them to compete in the national robotics competition, the FIRST Tech Challenge; a competition previously only available to those in participating schools. Find out more about the project here.
The big news in the autumn, we’re sad to say, is that The Green Man Gallery, our home for the past 10+ years, is to close in December. This is where we base our activities and store our kit, so this will have a big impact on our organisation. We’re working hard to ensure we can continue and an alternative venue for our Changing Faces workshops next year has been arranged. Offers of storage space are extremely welcome!
In other news: we have been writing funding applications to continue our projects; we carried out our annual review of hours for April 2023 to March 2024 – we estimate a total of 795.50 hours were spent Funny Wondering!; members of our team have been renewing their training – physical first aid with Purple Umbrella Training and safeguarding with the Derby & Derbyshire Safeguarding Children Partnership; and we conducted our annual environmental impact review – we estimate we need to plant 0.35 of a broad-leaf tree to offset our environmental impact. We also welcomed a new Director in October: Julia has come on-board to help run the High Peak Youth Robotics project.
As we enter the final months of the year, we look forward to our annual PAT testing day and our team’s Christmas get-together. We’re always looking to welcome new people into the organisation. If you’d like to get involved, please contact us.
