in January the core management of the group welcomed another member into it. for some time this person had been working with us in a silent partner capacity.
in so doing we’ve embarked on some development work as a group, both in our web presence and our project endeavours.
i’m not sure about revealing plans re developing projects, however if we don’t say something it looks like we’re not doing very much.
what we are doing is running quarterly peer to peer meetings. these are trusted safe spaces where on going ideas and thoughts can be aired and shared. we’re in negotiations with a sculptor about her showing a new work at an upcoming meeting. a spin off of the group meetings is my evolution of a 1:1 mentoring service.
we are also beginning to evolve our website. we feel that the site doesn’t optimally exhibit the work we’ve achieved so far. we might be criticised for not achieving very much in the time that we’ve been going, however i’d point out that we’ve achieved the majority of projects with just contributions to costs which we’ve worked to keep low. we achieved funding to get the peer to peer meetings off the ground and acknowledge the Derbyshire community foundation for their financial support. we have been able to maintain the meetings at a sustainable level since the funding finished.
the art trail became huge and unsustainable. as already mentioned we’re taking a year off from organising it so that we can plan for next year and for me to action developing my own practice. having explored what is possible to achieve without funding, we now are researching how to deliver a project that is professionally funded so that we can deliver it to a professional standard and meet our own sustainability needs.
i get excited when the core group meet now. i also am getting a buzz from the little things like updating our ‘about’ information on our Facebook profile.(1)
we currently have two funding applications awaiting to be assessed and in the very early stages of planning a third.
these are exciting times.
(1) https://www.facebook.com/corridor.arts
note : this post was editted 12/8/14, originally posted in february 2014.
