I’ve been blogging now for almost 8 months and this post is largely about reflecting on this experience. I think what has prompted this is my participation in a course about blogging that I began 4 weeks ago. The course is eight weeks long so I’m half way through and I am really enjoying it. There are regularly 6 people coming along and there is a nice spirit within the group. We are mixed ability in the sense that those like myself have a bit of experience with the blog thing but for the majority this is the first time they have tried it.
The course itself is part of a bigger project called “Blog yourself well” that is running over 12 months. Its component parts are thus; a blog design course which resulted in a blog site called Wellpool, 2 courses creating content under the auspices of “Community Reporting” of which I am attending the second course. There will also be a course for those interested in taking on a management role for the blog, the intention being for Wellpool to be run in the long term by a team trained volunteers.
The team behind the project are PSS Wellbeing Centres, Kindred Minds and Toxteth TV. You may recall that I have name-checked PSS Wellbeing Centres in previous blogs. Kindred Minds is a collection of service users of the Wellbeing Centres coming together with support from the PSS staff to begin identifying wellbeing projects and share a role in shaping, delivering and fundraising to make them a reality. KM has been going for almost 3 years and I have had a trustee role within the organisation all this time. It has had it challenges but I feel it has generally been a positive experience for me. In the last few years the trustees have raised some funds to manage a number of projects we have suggested eg, drumming, massage, healthy eating. With the Blog Yourself Well project we have our most ambitious piece of work to date and it has galvanized the trustees all of whom have joined other participants in learning lots of new skills.
The other partner organisation with the project is Toxteth TV; they are an established community media organisation and are supplying inspirational facilitation on all aspects of the project courtesy of Hayley Trowbridge. To date Hayley has already been able to get lots of our stories out there on the Wellpool Blog. We have collectively posted 33 stories to date on Wellpool and in the short time that our course has been running we have already posted stories about Mary Secole, Refugee Week, cycling and marathon running. I’m pleased to report the previous course provided a video blog about the health benefits of owning a dog.
This week see us tackling audio techniques to tell a story. I hope to be able to introduce such techniques into my blog in the future. Watch/Listen to this space!