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From fort to pit to port

VCS Cymru Chronicle Project

In September this year, VCS Cymru has been awarded £66,200.00 from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) for an exciting two year project, ‘Chronicle: History of Volunteering in Cardiff’. The project will research, collate, digitise, and make publicly available the story of charities and volunteering in the Southern Arc of Cardiff from 1914 to 2014.

Activities

The HLF-funded Chronicle project will research, collate, digitise, and make publicly available the story of charities and volunteering from 1914 to 2014 in the Southern Arc of Cardiff. It will encompass the ‘community spirit’ of both World Wars, the Peace Corps that followed WW2, children club in Tiger Bay, adventure playgrounds in Butetown and Grangetown, and the development of VCS, the Britain’s first volunteer bureau, in 1964. The project will deliver workshops/ training sessions, community open day events, radio programmes and podcasts, walking tours, an exhibition, and an online archive in partnership with People’s Collection Wales.

The project will demonstrate how necessity drew people together and created a culture from which the voluntary sector, which we know today, has grown. It is a story that has many correlations with challenges in today’s society.

Chronicle will link into a five-year scheme run by the National Council for Voluntary Organisations, ‘Digitising the Mixed Economy of Welfare in Britain’, and will seek to digitally preserve the records of the voluntary sector in Cardiff.

The key objectives of the project are to:

  • conserve and explore historical and cultural heritage of Cardiff
  • bring the story of past volunteering in Cardiff closer to people
  • motivate and inspire people to volunteer today
  • create learning and volunteering opportunities
  • encourage active community involvement: to bring together diverse local communities and to strengthen community ties.

The aim of creating learning and volunteering opportunities is to:

  • improve people’s access to formal learning: to offer people opportunity to gain transferrable skills and specialised skills in archive research, museum exhibition, digitisation, oral history, and media production
  • improve people’s employability through gaining new skills, and building confidence and aspirations, to enhance their CVs and gain reference, and to fulfil their full potential
  • gain valuable work experience through volunteering.

This is a two-year project, starting in December 2015 and ending in November 2017.

Resources

  • assistance in HLF or other heritage-related grant development
  • advice and assistance to charities and voluntary organisations who wish to preserve their historical records, create an archive, and utilise these resources
  • advertising/ promoting Fusion partners’ activities on the Chronicle website
  • other Fusion partners may attend future training session delivered by Glamorgan Archives and People’s Collection Wales, which will be organised for the Chronicle volunteers.

Contact details

Klavdija Erzen, Project Coordinator
Inroads Wellbeing Institute
96-98 Neville Street,
Cardiff, CF11 6LS

Klavdija.e@vcscymru.org.uk
Visit the VCS Chronicle website

Twitter: @vcs_chronicle
Facebook: chronicleVCSKlavdija Erzen, Project Coordinator