We’ve had a Manchester based charity called akt - Albert Kennedy Trust get in touch with us about the posibility of us running a skills session with them and i’m looking if there’s any interest from our membership in providing a one off session.
The charity supports LGBTQ+ young adults (18-25) who are homeless or in hostile home environments. We’re in very early stage discussions at the moment but generally they’re interested in either sewing skills, or basic woodwork/ life DIY/maintenance skills, e.g. how to put up a level shelf, how to change a washer on a sink, how to hang a picture, basic sewing and clothes repairs that type of thing.
They’re fairly flexible on timings, and there might be some funding available from the charity to cover costs. The charity would also provide two members of staff to accompany the 5-10 participants.
At the moment I’m gauging if anyone would be interested in taking this on and arranging something with the charity, and secondly, if not taking it on, being a helper at the event when we start to flesh out what the session is actually going to entail. The events likely to be around end of May/start of June.
If the event was going to involve sewing, we’d probably need a couple of us who are trained on the sewing machines in attendance, and then the start of the session would be a version of our in-house induction.
I’ll raise this again at the members meeting as well, so have a think if you’d like to be involved. LGBTQ+ members particularly encouraged as it would be nice to be able to put forward some role models, but anyone is welcome.
also as ‘official guy who keeps mentioning emerge’ they take on volunteers and run general woodworking inductions and I can make them aware too if akt are interested in contact with other community orgs as well
Happy to be the point of contact for the charity and to organise it. I’d need some help with planning/executing the actual project we get them to do though, especially if it’s more woodwork/DIY based.
If we end up going for sewing, @Josephxtian I think you mentioned you had a simple washbag sewing pattern?
Also, I’m part of a local queer sewing/knitting group, and there are a couple of folks there who I think would love to help out too - loaning extra sewing machines or helping teach how to use them/being general LGBT+ peers.
As mentioned in the members meeting @tomh91 is now taking a lead on this. Get in touch with him if you’d like to help but haven’t registered an interest yet.
Small update: AKT like the sound of making something rather than just general DIY (so probably sewing or woodwork). They’re currently checking funding, risk assessments etc and will get back to us with suggestions for dates.
Not much to update. They contacted me two days ago. They are still interested in running a session, likely in July (although I think it could run into August at this rate).
I’ve given them two options - a sewing session to make a washbag, or a woodworking session to make animal hutches for the animal charity that also contacted us. They’re going to discuss with their group which they’d prefer.