The Hope Centre

Yesterday (27th February) we had our meeting at The Hope Centre, Bradford. Unfortunately Julie and Ben couldn't make it so we just met with June. She began by showing us around the centre which was part of the Inn Churches scheme and was currently having its turn playing host to 12 individuals in need of shelter during the winter months. We looked around the sleeping areas which were warm and welcoming (see photo below). I noticed how they had all put the few belongings they had out on display, using the windowsills as shelves and the chairs as places to neatly hand their clothes. The respect they had for their belongings reaffirmed that we should really take time and care to make these items special for the receivers to cherish.

After looking around we went and had a brew (thanks June!) and discussed our ideas for the project. Our idea for including a tag or booklet with each item to explain it's journey went down a treat! She was really interested in the idea of donation boxes and suggested that we could put one in The Hope Centre as well as at Inn Churches HQ but thought this would be good as a supporting method of gaining materials alongside actual workshops. It was mentioned that the workshops would work well on several levels including:

- Engaging otherwise isolated individuals with a wider community project while encouraging social engagement.

- Raising awareness of the work done by Inn Churches.

- Being able to source primary research about the fabrics while engaging directly with a wider community.

June also mentioned it may be a idea to work with children on the project and that she had a contact named Gaby Young who runs a after school group and may be interested in us running some workshops there. She's going to contact Gaby and let us know what she thinks. Rhi suggested that we could perhaps run drawing workshops with them and transform their images into textiles using sublimation printing.

We agreed that the final date for completing any workshops would be the 4th April in order to leave ourselves enough time to create the items. June is going to contact Julie Mord about potentially working with the Live at Home group and Gaby about working with the after school club.

I feel like a lot of progress has been made during today's meeting and that the project is really heading in a positive direction in terms of really engaging with the community!