Space-Artist-brief

We would like to ask everyone to have a read of this and pass on the message to anyone who you think might need to know.

LOOKING BACK – THE STORY SO FAR

We have spent the last 5+ months adapting and flexing our programmes, activities and services to work alongside the community, other local organisations and groups to support the community of Wester Hailes with food, phone calls, art and wellbeing packs, digital devices and support and much more. We have not furloughed any staff and we have all been working hard throughout lockdown doing our best to meet basic needs.

This has only been possible due to our hard-working and committed staff, freelance artists, volunteers, board trustees, tenants, partners including residents groups and our supportive and understanding funders.

Here is our March – July 2020 Covid Response Report – https://issuu.com/whalearts/docs/whale_covid_response_final_july_2020

Food

Our first priority was food – we quickly turned our community meal into a community take-away and shortly after that we started a home delivery service. 

Lockdown restrictions meant many people were needing a hot meal delivered to their doors and thanks to our fantastic chef and dedicated team of volunteers & delivery drivers we were able to increase our food production from 60 to 160 portions per week. To date, we have made and sent out more than 2500 meals. 

Networks

Keenly aware of the increased need for food and other services, WHALE Arts, along with Space & Broomhouse Hub and Big Hearts, became a founding partner in the Go Beyond network (https://wearegobeyond.org). This group of local organizations was initially set up to coordinate food provision across South-West Edinburgh and later expanded to support a much wider range of needs. 

As part of this network, WHALE Arts set up an interactive food map (https://viewer.mapme.com/59471d74-6cf4-45f4-bd03-117f4b29abc5) which was later expanded to include other services including mental health and wellbeing and has been embedded on WHALE Arts, Broomhouse and several other organisations websites. Staff and members of the public can use this map to easily find out what services are available across the area and how they can access them.  

WHALE Arts along with the Health Agency organised and co-chaired fortnightly online meetings of Wester Hailes Together – a grouping of third sector organisations, schools, NHS staff, churches and residents groups coming together to support each other and share ideas and approaches to adapting programmes and services. This has now merged with the long-standing network Living Well Wester Hailes and meetings happen monthly. We set up a #westerhailes channel in the Go Beyond Slack workspace which anyone is welcome to join (email leah@whalearts.co.uk if you want to know how).

Art Packs, Wellbeing Packs, Online Activity, Digital Support

Alongside the fundamental need for food, the need for human connections has been heightened during lockdown especially with so many restrictions on our getting together with others. 

Human connections and meaningful activity have been at the forefront of our efforts, despite having to cancel all our regular groups. Our freelance artists have been especially busy producing regular activities for their participants to do at home and providing art packs specific to each of their groups. To date, there are more than 60 different activities, for children, teenagers and adults which are all available on our website for anyone to download https://www.whalearts.co.uk/online-classes/ 

On top of their regular activities, our staff and freelancers have been offering friendship calls to our participants, checking in regularly to make sure they are ok and signposting to other essential services where necessary.  

Our group art packs became very popular and we started getting requests from organizations and individuals out with WHALE Arts. This led us to develop a series of generic art packs both for children and adults and to create our wellbeing packs. These proved to be incredibly popular and thanks to the herculean efforts of our incredible fundraiser and dedicated team of staff, freelancers and volunteers, we have made and delivered more than 2000 art and wellbeing packs to local schools, families and individuals within the community. 

We have also been engaging with several collaborative art projects – both through our Creative Placemaking Team and 7 Kingdoms projects and with other organisations including the Edinburgh Art Festival. Though these collaborations we have been able to offer a wider range of art packs and activities for people to get involved with. 

Lockdown has seen a huge uptake in online resources and digital service delivery across a wide range of platforms. At WHALE Arts we have embraced this, however, we’ve also been acutely aware that many of our people do not have access to the internet or devices such as laptops, tablets or smartphones. This means a significant proportion of our community has been excluded from accessing these resources.

Our Digital & Communities Lead has done some amazing work in this area, supported by our fundraiser, he’s been able to supply tablets with internet access to several residents. On top of this, he has been delivering one to one tutorials to help people get to grips with their new devices and develop the skills they need to access the wide range of digital resources on offer. 

Our Creative Placemaking team have also been tapping into the digital delivery trend by offering a series of one to one creative sessions via Zoom and Whatsapp to particularly vulnerable individuals within our community. 

Small Grants

We were awarded Supporting Communities funding which enabled us to upscale the adapted services mentioned as well as being awarded £20,000 to distribute to local residents groups, organisations and locals to support Wester Hailes residents during the recovery phase and has supported litter picking, supporting families, moving church services online, canal-based youth work, gardening and much more.

Volunteering

We have also employed a short-term Volunteer Coordinator who is helping us to support local resident volunteers to gradually and safely get back into volunteering at WHALE Arts.

LOOKING FORWARD – WHAT’S NEXT?

These plans are based on current information and advice and may be subject to change.

We will communicate with participants about exactly when their activity will be restarting, how sessions will be taking place and respond to any questions or queries to ensure everyone feels comfortable taking part in our programmes.

The Building

The WHALE Arts Centre remains closed to the public.We remain cautious following the guidelines that relate to Scottish Government Phase 3 of the Covid-19 Route Map. We are currently carrying out risk assessments and making adaptations to the building and our programme and we are looking ahead to the next few months and planning to carefully, tentatively and safely resume some of our programmes and activities.

Food

As lockdown restrictions are being lifted, we are encouraging people to use our community takeaway so we can ease back on the delivery services. We know there are a small number of people who will not be able to do this and we will continue to deliver meals to the most vulnerable for as long as we possibly can.

This will be from 1:00pm – 2:00pm each Friday at WHALE Arts. Please come to the Performance Space doors – there will be signage if you don’t know the way. We have queueing measures in place to help with social distancing to keep everyone safe.

Although the WHALE Arts building remains closed to the public the Community Fridge managed by SCOREscotland will restart reduced days – Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. If you would like to use the Community Fridge please contact SCOREscotland on 0131 442 2341 or 07496 190 916

Art & Wellbeing Packs and Online Activity

We are planning one more round of wellbeing packs which will be available soon and we have a range of creative projects & packs which will be coming out over the next few months. We will continue to put out creative activities on our website and social media and will keep you up to date with our plans for reopening the building and resume some of our regular activities. 

Our Programme

The WHALE Arts programmes that stopped meeting in person from mid-March were:

Stitch n Time; smARTcraft; Men’s Making ; Let’s Create; Street Arts; Let’s Dance; Play Sense Create; Film Club; smARTies; Mums into Business; Wester Hailes Connects Digital Skills Drop-ins; Members Breakfasts; Community Gardening; CreativePlacemaking.

From 20th August onwards – the following outdoor activities will restart, small groups with social distancing:

• Street Arts
• Community Gardening Group

From end September onwards (no firm dates and will not be usual indoor group activity) – we are planning very small outdoor and indoor group activity for adults, young people and families.

Participants in our groups will be contacted directly once we have more detail to share.

Partner Programmes (which usually happen at WHALE)

Programmes delivered with partners were also postponed in March:

Room for Art – with Art in Healthcare; Fork in the Road – Edinburgh Tool Library; Expecting Something – with Starcatchers; Open Book; Indian dance – Theiya Arts; Edinburgh Art Festival – art trips and schools groups; NuStart.

Our partner organizations will be in touch directly with participants when they are ready to restart sessions and we will share this information with our community when we have it.

Room Bookings, Rentable Office Desks and Office Tenancies

Although our building will not be accessible to the public or for our participants for usual art activities, events and classes just yet, we are slowly and carefully opening our doors to having room bookings again. We have introduced strict measures to reduce the risk of coronavirus transmission in the building through a thorough risk assessment.

We aim to officially commence with room bookings and rentable office desks in the WHALE Arts building from 21st September as a provisional start date (this date is subject to change).

The spaces we will be offering are listed below:

• Arts Workshop (meetings in limited numbers)
• Coworking Space (rental desks)
• Board room 
• Wee Office Space (long-term tenancy available)

Get in touch with Laura Delahunt for a conversation about room, office and desk bookings laura@whalearts.co.uk

Let Us Know If You Need Help

Please get in touch with the WHALE Arts team if you need support or a conversation on 0131 458 3267 or by emailing info@whalearts.co.uk

WHALE Arts launches the Treasured Tree project involving the Adult Programmes participants to remotely create leaves, blossom and fruit to be displayed together as a large sculpture in September. 

With the aim to keep all participants who used to attend the adults groups connected, entertained and actively creative, the community-led arts charity and social enterprise in the South West of Edinburgh, WHALE Arts has launched a new project.

The facilitators of all adult groups have been busy working collaboratively and came up with the creation artform of a tree, The Treasured Tree.

Every single member who participates in the adult programmes at WHALE is invited to participate from their own homes helping to build it in three different stages for which they receive art packs with craft materials to firstly design the Leaves, then the Blossom and finally the Fruits.

The end result is to symbolically plant the Tree in the art centre at the end of Summer, share it on social media and invite everyone to view it once the building is re-open. Also open to give it continuity by travelling around the area, making the wide community feel connected by its roots.

Behind the Scenes – meet the groups and facilitators!

This project is supported by WHALE’s co-production artist in residence Morvern Odling. The Treasured Tree co-production project ‘Growing Our Own Artists’ that Morvern leads is supported by the William Grant Foundation and Creative Scotland, and has adapted to support ongoing collaborations during the Covid-19 crisis. The project is also supported by Fabien Merville, one of the core team members at WHALE Arts.

The adult facilitators in this collaborative project and groups involved are Rachael Hunter representing SmARTcraft, Lillian Shipton: Let’s Create, Debbie Wright: Stitch’n’Time and Sindy Santos: Mums into Business.

SmARTcraft is an art group for adults with diverse needs. This group provides an open and inclusive space for its members to try out new creative techniques. The members of smARTcraft are very varied in their approach to art and enjoy drawing, painting, animation and model making, among many other disciplines.

Rachael Hunter is a multi-disciplined visual artist, with a background in animation and film making. She has worked in community art and youth work for over 5 years and has been the SmARTcraft lead artist since January 2018.

Let’s Create is a therapeutic art group for women. They meet on a Tuesday and spend the morning immersed in creativity, making anything from naturally dyed paper to lino printing and everything in-between. At the end of each session they come together to share a meal,  debrief about the day so far, chat about their weeks and create a safe space which is welcoming, warm and most of all fun.

Lillian Shipton, Art Therapist and Ceramicist. Lillian is an art therapist who enjoys working with children, young people and adults from all different walks of life. She is also a ceramicist and believe in the therapeutic benefits of working with clay, both within her own art and within her art therapy practice.

Stitch’n’Time is a group of people who share a love of stitching. They love getting together on Tuesday afternoon to sew, knit, crochet, embroider or even glue! They love creating items for local organisations. They learn new skills while giving back to the local community. Hardly a week goes past without a good laugh shared over a cup of tea and a piece of cake.

Debbie Wright loves all things to do with fabric. She has run her own soft furnishings business for the past 20 years. She likes nothing better than sharing her love of sewing with other people hence Stitch’n’Time came into being over ten years ago.

MUMS into BUSINESS is a supportive group designed for main carers with an interest in setting up their own business. Adviced by professionals like Business Gateway, the group has been meeting Fridays at WHALE with creche since 2018. Also celebrate Markets in the South West Edinburgh community where the Ladies sell products or promote services. The sessions are now on Zoom. https://m.facebook.com/Mumsintobusiness/?ref=bookmarks Sindy Santos got her degree in Journalism in Spain where she worked for different newspapers, radio and government press. Then moved to Scotland and lived the last decade in South West Edinburgh. She writes about this community and coordinates Mums into Business among other creative projects.

They all agree this is a great way to keep the participants’ creativity levels up and busy during the months of lockdown, a time of physical distancing yet making social connections and the hope for a future when everyone will come together again.

As Debbie well said about the Treasured Tree Project “The participants are being represented by the branches, leaves and WHALE Arts centre being the trunk. The trunk is pointless without the branches. The finished item would show everyone who took part that they are in fact the blossom and the fruit of the WHALE Tree, each one beautiful and valuable”.

We are looking forward to the final piece, but for now, first set of art packs on the way, bring on the creativity skills, let the fun begins and make memories!

Written by Sindy Santos