It was now the beginning of August and the Olympics were in full swing, but it wasn’t all doom and gloom; I made a breakthrough with the Embassy and managed to get an outline of our project in front of the Consulate for consideration and was waiting to hear from them. I got put through to John Bird’s PA (Julie) and she said he was really interested in our project, although he currently was on holiday and we should talk again in a couple of weeks. December, Julie said (I’d originally put this forward in my email) might be tricky as xmas was a really busy and important time for the Big Issue and the homeless. How naive I was, not taking this into account in the original plan – of course the end of the year would make sense to us, with people spending money, wanting to give to charity etc. but a crucial time for them, should we want John on board. Thankfully I was immediately able to explain that we were now possibly looking at a later date.
Things were happening so fast, I still had to run the delay by the artists to make sure this would work for them. Thankfully they were actually quiet relieved I think, and fully supportive.
A new challenge arose though – now we needed new photos of the children to work with, Philly was struggling to get enough children on board. It was bad news in that without children the project was a non-starter, but good news in that if we could now get a fresh group of children together then we would be more likely to make the reciprocity nature of the project work. The artists all got images to me by the agreed date and I send them on to Bolivia, together with some funds for art materials. Meanwhile Philly tried to work out how to engage enough children on the project. Many of them knew nothing about life outside Sucre, never mind wanting to involve themselves with a project that was so far away. To give you some idea, we are talking about 7-12 year olds; this would be tricky with most children never mind amongst these children who have so little. There was hope though, another organisation in the town that runs libraries for the communities, encouraging them to read and write, was keen to help out … so maybe it wasn’t a disaster after all.
Around this time I also met with Terry, from venue we were looking at the possibility of using. Again the initial contact email I sent had suggested pre-xmas, but as we now talked and explored the option of post-xmas and how much needed and could be done, it became major-league apparent that the delay was the best decision so far. Terry was amazing. He gave me loads of tips; he’d even done some new research into areas we could look at links with and people/organisations we could approach that might be keen to get on board. I came away with my head buzzing but fully energised. Lots to chew on and lots of leads to follow up, now instead of looking for one venue for one event, I was considering a number of events in the run up to a big finale… like I haven’t got enough to get done already, oh well “in for a penny, in for a pound”.
Initially when the project was first coming together a marketing friend (Laura) had offered to help with the admin minefield, this was an amazing offer and I knew it would help immensely. But it has proved a busy time for her at work so she hasn’t managed to input that much so far, what with work sending her overseas a fair bit… I’ll just have to look at that big list Terry and I drew up of things to look into and source and see how many of the artists have time to contribute that little bit extra … when I get a minute to look at it myself!
