Beauty and the Beast 2008

Beauty and the Beast 2008
Helen Pheasey Concordia UK

The failed attempt
The idea for beauty and the beast and the tool kit was excellent and I have stolen lots of the ideas from it! However our first attempt was not very successful; we tried running the campaign at 3 projects with no success. I suggested it to 2 very strong leaders but it was very last minute and they did not have the time to fully understand what it involved. The 3rd project had problems and it was not possible to do anything extra!

The success
Because we think it is such a good idea we decided to try again at our post season event. This was much more successful. We cheated a little as myself and Fiona collected rubbish from the office and our homes to use. And it was also clear from our feedback that we would need more tools so we bought a glue gun, metal cutters and some other things we thought would be useful.

Because all of our leaders said that the idea was too vague we decided to give the group a theme so we decided to do a fashion show and the volunteers had to make an accessory for the show.

The volunteers understood much better what to do and it was a lot easier this way.
The photos of our fashion show are on:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/concordia-iye/sets/72157602428844844/

The future
We would like to see this campaign continue and intend to suggest it to camp leaders at our co-ordinator training, there will not be time at the training weekend to do another fashion show but we hope to get the idea across and some of the people who were at the Post season event may co-ordinate again for us. We think this will make the campaign much more real for the group leaders and we hope that in 2008 we will have some results. We will also allow the group leaders to borrow the tools we bought.

If this does not work in 2008 I think we will continue to suggest it as an idea but perhaps not put so much energy into it.

An Idea
One of the criticisms we had was that it is great we are making something out of this rubbish but ultimately it will end up on a landfill site (even after it has been to France!) I have had an idea to take it a step further by looking at the country of origin on the labels and working out how many air miles were used in getting the packaging to the UK in the first place – I don’t know if you know the global pizza activity but it would be similar to that.

Global Education
At the moment we are developing our UK programme to include global education activities, either giving the co-ordinator tools at the training or when I go to visit the projects and we are working on an award that our volunteers can get for Global Education related activities they do. Once we have this off the ground I will be sharing it with the Alliance and CCIVS. If there was to be a feedback session or follow up seminar I would be keen to participate or be on the prep team but I think it would be more successful if it was on a wider topic than just the art project – “Making Workcamps More Sustainable” for example.