Breaking Bread Christmas Special a success!

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DSC00790A special festive thank you to all our participants who attended our Breaking Bread Christmas Special at Chapter Arts House this Friday. The team hosted their second official workshop and in partnership with the Trinity Project, Splott, Cathays Community Centre and the Dalton Street Centre. We were part funded by the Tesco Charity Trust which enabled us to host a truly special workshop. Focusing on the mobility of the service we set up in a ‘white space’ with an oven hired from M&M Catering Wales. The recipe was a simple cinnamon loaf divided into mini tins for sharing. We also provided icing materials to let the group add festival decorations.

DSC00808The workshop focused on testing what was possible with very limited facilities, cooking times with a hire oven, health and safety, practical issues, as well as continuing to establish key links with Community Services and key protagonists across South Wales. The degree of ‘sharing’ provided by the workshop and the possibilites to connect with people in creative and exciting ways was also monitored.

A massive thank you to everybody who helped make the event possible, Happy Christmas from the team and looking forward to seeing everybody in the new year for more events and workshops.

Leah connects with Communities First Clusters across Cardiff

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Continue reading Leah connects with Communities First Clusters across Cardiff

CARIAD presents at CEWN showcase event in Trefforest

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664801_origThanks to the Creative Exchange Wales Network for hosting their latest showcase event, experts from industry, Welsh Government and the BBC attended to give advice and support recent projects.

Leah presented on several of her projects which have received CEWN support, including iMagine, Breaking Bread and ProFoundCoding. She spoke of scaling up plans for Breaking Bread and the video tagging project in progress, aiming to improve teachers understanding of children with profound and complex learning and communication difficulties. More details about the event can be viewed here.

 

 

Final workshops underway for ProFoundCoding

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Thanks to AnalysisPro and teachers Andrew Walker and Rachel Woodhouse for working with us over the past few months to develop our latest video tagging templates. The project won additional funding from CEWN to create new templates based around concepts of engagement to tag video sessions of children with profound and complex learning and communication difficulties. We will be releasing the template shortly along with instructions on ways to use and interpret the template for teachers in special schools. We will be adding the latest templates and information to our resource and website, ProFoundCoding which we released over the summer.

We spoke about the project at a recent CEWN special showcase event at the University of South Wales, Trefforest where we pitched the next stages to create new employment opportunities in special schools for Performance Analysis. Watch this space 🙂

 

Showcase event at the Wales Millennium Centre

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Thanks to everybody for attending our showcase event at the Wales Millennium Centre especially the staff and service users from the Gladys Resource Centre at Aberdare for creating such a memorable performance. Thanks also to Touch Trust, CEWN, SIP and all of our other supporters for making the past two years so memorable and successful.

 

 

 

 

Leah connects with ACE (Action in Caerau and Ely) and Communities First Cardiff West

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Thanks to Rachel and Katie for talking to us about the extensive range of community projects on the go as part of Communities First Cardiff West – http://www.aceplace.org/#!communities-first/c8hd . Our meeting discussed many of the amazing work being undertaken and the ways CARIAD might contribute in the future. We talked about energy saving projects, food health, public health, connecting communities and much more. Looking forward to working with you in the near future.

Leah visits the inspiring Trinity Project

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Thank you Chloe for showing us around the church and telling us about The Trinity Project today. Established by Cardiff Methodist Circuit, the project aims to strengthen and support work with refugees and asylum seekers. The space itself acts as a hub for hive of community activity and events ranging from English classes, to drop in centres for Asylum seekers, offering craft classes, tea, coffee and food. Read more and follow the project here.

Plans for much much more are underway and Breaking Bread hopes to host a session there in the near future. Space4U also works in the church, providing comfortable spaces for those in need. We are looking forward to working with you soon, thanks for having us 🙂 

 

CARIAD attends Creative Minds Conference

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CARIAD’s Leah and Wendy were delighted to attend the Creative Minds conference in @Bristol today. The day was packed with thought provoking and challenging talks, interactive activities and sharing of new ideas relating to arts and disability. The event showcased the work of leading arts organisations, educators, businesses and charities, specialising in working with people with learning difficulties. These included Disability Arts Cymru, Outside In, Carousel, OpenStoryTellers, Magpie, DanceVoice, Turning Tides and many many more check out the Creative Minds website for full listings, www.creativemindsproject.org.uk.

There was lots of debate, including issues of quality in the arts working with people with learning difficulties, and balancing corporate sponsorship and expectations with pure creativity in art making. The day also showcased the work of local artists with disabilities, new research and funding opportunities. CARIAD discussed many of their latest projects and discussed many new collaborations and potential projects! Thanks for the invite Creative Minds – cant wait to see the films and outcomes from the day and looking forward to working with you in future!

Leah has a chat with Radio Cardiff about Breaking Bread

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Leah met up with Luke from Cardiff Voluntary Services Cardiff this week when he asked her to appear on their volunteering broadcast to talk about her latest project Breaking Bread. She talked about recent innovations with CARIAD and new plans to extend her recent successful workshops.

Leah has received some extended funding from Cardiff Met Alumni and development fund in the interim and the Breaking Bread team are exploring new opportunities. Watch this space! We shared our air time with @BulliesOut an award winning Charity providing help and support to people and organisations affected by bullying.

Thanks Luke, really enjoyed it and looking forward to working with you in the future 🙂 You can listen to the cast here http://www.mixcloud.com/CardiffInAction/

First performance of Somability held at Millennium Centre

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Thank you very much Digital Innovation week for hosting the first live performance of Somability in action. It was a wonderful event and opportunity to showcase our service users performing with Somability. DSC08483The biggest thanks of all go to Cath, her staff and the service users at Gladys Resource Centre Aberdare, who put on a wonderful show demonstrating some of their newly learned choreography and gestural movements as a part of working with Artis Community, well done Artis Community you are certainly making movement irresistible!

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Thanks also to Eluned Parrott AM for stopping by to have a look at the project development thus far, lovely to see you and to have your support. Wendy and Mareck from CARIADinteractive also gave a talk about (co)-creation, giving us all some insights into inclusive and participatory design. Filmmaker Dan was also on site, he has been awarded funding from Cardiff Met to make a film for Somability.

Nice to meet you Dan and looking forward to the end result! Finally thank you to Steven from the BBC for organising the event, coming to see the performances in Aberdare, and making us all feel a part of Digital Innovation Week, I hope the rest of the week’s antics go well!

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