So,what else, then?

I know I post inconsistently, and I apologise, but we have a pretty inconsistent life.  Part of the reason we have this blog is to reveal to people a bit more of who we are, where we’re coming from, and what we do, and we do a lot.  Barely 1% of our activity, and the work we do to make it active, is possible to show here, but we like to give it a go, every now and then.  So – this week we have:

Worked hard on recruitment for – Echoes project manager, Echoes evaluator, and an administrator for Friction.  We take HR very seriously and spend a lot of time reading, assessing, discussing and sometimes arguing about who we want to work with and why.  We’re obviously keen on equal opps – genuinely and ethically, rather than being policy-led and work hard on ensuring it’s embedded into the process. We always offer feedback to interviewees – however tough this can sometimes be, we usually find some reason to want  to employ everyone, and certainly giving them feedback is the least we can do in return for their time and energy.  So the process takes a long time.  We have now appointed the Echoes staff and will be interviewing for our administrator over the next couple of weeks and will be making appropriate announcements at the appropriate time.

Floated a knitted coral reef in the Floozie in the Jacuzzi – as a test for 80 year old artist Sheila Artur’s AACV installation for the torch relay on Sunday (it worked)

Submitted a bid to start a new ‘art club’ for young people in Highgate (successful – woohoo!)

Delivered a workshop with our Autism group at the Windmill centre, including developing some work to add to the exhibition at the Public, and being shadowed by Ricardo, a regular volunteer and Nicholas, a youth worker from Castle Vale.

Worked on a stakeholder map for the Echoes project, in preparation for the new project manager starting – fortunately we have had a 4m square vinyl map of Digbeth and Highgate made (available to hire at reasonable rates), which is ideal for sticking post-its to.

Delivered a workshop with the group from Blue River, who will be exhibiting work as part of Yard Talk next Saturday 7th July at the Edge.

Cleared out and rearranged loads of equipment in the Edge and ‘The Third Space’ (our new, as yet unnamed annexation), in preparation for next weeks event

Moved some of Vivid’s stuff out of the way.  Currently, this is taking up about a third of our first floor meeting space.  As you may know, Vivid is now defunct and, despite having a bit of a variable relationship with them over the years, we offered to give them space to house and digitise their archive.  We believe it’s an important part of Brum’s arts heritage and it would be an awful shame if it was binned, so we’ve supported making this happen.  Without being paid for it. ‘Cos that’s how we roll, or because we’re idiots, not sure which.

Loads of other bitty housekeeping and admin jobs like ordering new bins (actually quite exciting, we’ve been smuggling trash into our domestic collection for the past four years, to avoid bcc’s exorbitant charges), promoting Yard Talk (a lot of our marketing is face to face or at least phone to phone, given our audiences), meetings, working on budgets (always the most demanding part of any project) and research, research, research.  We are also continuing to develop our relationship with Sustained theatre, in anticipation of our feasibility study starting in a few weeks.

And it’s only Wednesday afternoon.

Anyway, in many ways a fairly typical week, in that there is no such thing, here at the Edge, but typical in the varied ‘work plan’ (haha) and work/life balance (bigger haha, we’ve got it sussed, it’s all work or research, so we don’t have to worry about keeping it balanced).  So, there you go, a little snapshot of what goes on ‘behind the scenes’ to make our stuff happen.  It’s a lot of fun.