Closing one circle and starting another

 Today we had our final evaluation session for the Who Holds The Torch project.

It was very successful pulling in hundreds of listeners every day, and a growing number every day too.

Today though, it was great to talk to some of the people in the community who helped make the pieces with Skimstone Arts. I was speaking to Loretta in particular, with Kema and Magpie, and it was great to be able to extract a personal reflection of what this meant to her. Skimstone is at heart a company dedicated to helping those at risk of social isolation, and it was nice to feel like a goal had been achieved. I helped coordinate some of the listener evaluation session too.



At the same time, we also evaluated internally on the process of working throughout the last few months on this project, looking ahead at the next on in March!

Even from last Tuesday, while the last project was ongoing, I met with the RO team to start prepping for the final festival of Skimstone's 3 year Reaching Out programme. Annalisa explained more about the roots of the programme, while Cristina explained more of the funding behind things. It was eye-opening to see how tightly the funding seasons influenced what we put on.

We brainstormed some ideas about virtual festivals, and I contributed ideas from NSDF (National Student Drama Festival), an online history festival I had taken part in on the Battle of Trafalgar at the beginning of lockdown, and the FFUK (Fukushima Friends UK) online lecture series I am delivering to university professors in Japan too. We agreed that it was important for things to have a real synchronous value: this couldn't just be like watching youtube videos alone. We wanted to try and capture some of the immersive party vibe as well.

I have trawled some of last year's festival's programme to see what can be translated online, and we agreed that separating into different rooms, with different guys from Skimstone leading workshops could work well.

We also discussed using new social media trends. Cristina enquired about how TikTok could be used within the festival, and I was happy to talk about its benefits in boosting organic viral spread and interaction, in a way that would hopefully drive engagement.

We also liked the idea of sending packs out for people to work with, so everybody could follow along at home. This achieved the inclusivity aims of the company.

As today was my last meeting with absolutely everyone in the company, I also thanked everyone for their help over the last few months too!

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