ALUMNI SUPPORT AND LEGACY

THE ROOSEVELT SCHOLARSHIP – NEEDS YOU

The scholarship is undergoing planning to make a number of changes in the coming months. If there are any alumni with specific skills that could help, then please get in touch with Russ on 07767-797-335. Specifically, we are looking for help with taxation, marketing and legal issues.

The Scholarship is now funded largely by gifts made by our unique network of Alumni – from the returning scholars who donate each month through a standing order, to the couple who now give more than £2,000 a year. Please consider joining them if you can, both in memory and tribute of your own scholarship and of the many special people who made your journey something you will always treasure.  To become part of the Alumni network who now enable others in this way, find a simple form below to set up a regular gift via standing order, (and also a gift aid form to enable the scholarship to reclaim tax on every penny we can).

Update from Ben Felstead – 2018 SCHOLAR

https://www.instagram.com/trekkahnottsrooseveltscholar  and https://trekkahartist.blogspot.com/

The Roosevelt Travelling Memorial Scholarship has been a journey that I will never forget. The trip was a life changing experience and I would like to show my appreciation and share thanks with all of the Members of the board, the past scholars I interacted and the Nottingham Roosevelt Scholarship family as a whole for gifting me this opportunity. I would like to especially thank Russ Blenkinsop and Sheridan Chilvers for all of the hard work they put into my Roosevelt Scholarship. The Scholarship not only reached all of my expectations whilst in the States but prior to the trip it has also attracted my interest towards local politics through the engagement with County Hall, the County Mayor and City Major, and it has also provided me with a new enhanced obsession for Nottingham – our City and Counties history and our current and future affairs.

Travelling through the United States of America visiting (14) States, (34) organisations, (7) hosts and host families and everything that I did in-between definitely achieved my ambitions of seeing a diverse range of culture, community and environment. Throughout the scholarship, I explored a vast range of community arts and their application. I visited organisations that use music, visual arts, poetry, opera, digital arts, dance, theatre, photography and film, and I worked alongside organisations that delivered these art forms in a range of contexts, tackling social, environmental, cultural and racial issues that affect people within their local communities.

In all instances, I witnessed the artist as a great communicator, a vital medium that when placed in a community setting can have a profound effect on the mindset and wellbeing of the community they work within. Overall I was blown away at the level in which community arts are delivered, funded and evaluated across the States. The organisations I visited were at the forefront of tackling, raising awareness and breaking down barriers within political and social issues and this was honoured through the high level of private funding that support the arts and non-for profit organisations throughout America.

The Scholarship has provided me with new skills, knowledge and an overseas network of like-minded community practitioners. It has refreshed my passion and drive to champion the arts as a method to engage community groups and socially excluded groups, and to use the arts to tackle wider issues on a local, national and global scale. I have so many new ideas and visions of where I would like the directions of my community arts work to develop too and now have a Trans-Atlantic support group of like-minded professionals that I can call upon for ideas, practice sharing and also collaborative projects.

The Scholarship allowed me to step back and observe community arts in a new context and environment. It exposed the value the arts can have upon the individual and local communities as a collective and it showed me the power of the artist as a communicator and community mentor. The scholarship has refreshed my vision of how I can to continue to develop my ideas and my work within the community sector; strengthening and supporting socially excluded members of the community in Nottingham. The arts are so important in shaping our community, promoting expressionism, providing a lifeline and support network and offering a platform for unheard voices.

Throughout the scholarship, I interviewed most of the community arts practitioners, organisations and participants I worked with. I am currently working on putting this together as a documentary. I focused my interviews on exploring what community meant to them, what were the main issues impacting their local community and how they felt that the arts could strengthen and support these issues. The main issues that were highlighted in the interviews were very similar to the issues that face us in Nottingham. Homelessness, Gang Culture, Gentrification and Displacement, Drug Abuse, Mental Health, Physical Health, Environmental Detachment, Environmental Issues, Racial Discrimination and Segregation, Immigration, Underserved Community Facilities and Areas, Health Care Access and Social Inclusion.

The entire trip was amazing, and all of the organisations I visited inspired and educated me in many different areas. At Totem Star I saw the power of having positive mentors from the arts in the lives of young people from underserved communities. I witnessed Urban Artworks and their work towards liberating young people from underserved backgrounds to take ownership of their City and in the process to earn money from their efforts. The Delridge Arts Festival offered a perfect example of how the Arts – Music, Film, Photography and Visual Arts can facilitate and ignite this interaction and build a passion towards reconnecting with our natural surroundings. Supporting our individual well-being and act as a platform where education, preservation and exploration of pressing environmental issues can be explored. Creativity Explored taught me the value of showcasing participants work, enforcing my ideologies around everyone already being an artist – that they do not have to work tirelessly at learning to be an artist, more just being involved and the production of creative work mean you are already an artist. The LAPD taught me a lot about community activism and how the Arts can present, explore and showcase community issues. In the same light, UCEPP focused on educating and supporting homeless residents from Skidrow on the local politics and systems that so drastically affect their lives. Through doing this they empower the community members to take an active role in trying to positively develop their situation.

I learnt so much from Chris Jonas about the ethos of his organisation Little Globe and also around their approach to their community artists personal development. Wisefool presented to me how we can use the arts alongside community and community issues to lobby for equality, change and fairness within the community. Say Si exampled the 10 rules of community work that came out of the Wallace Foundations report. Rules such as; Executive directors that have a deep, public commitment to the arts, Professional, practising artists as teachers and Dedicated, inspiring and welcoming spaces in which young people can practice their arts. And finally SOUP was an extremely inspirational visit for me. The organisation showed me a way to provide funding for grassroots organisations, individuals and ideas. It provides this platform by focusing on the individuals within the local community and financially supporting their ideas on how to shape their own communities through crowdfunding. These are just a handful of examples of my findings and the journey I travelled during my Roosevelt scholarship.

Throughout my time in the States I have met organisations that fight tirelessly for social and racial justice, organisations that continue to fight for basic sanitisation rights for the forgotten and underserved members of the community. I have met organisations that use the arts to create safe places for members of the community, people that did not already have a safe place where they feel comfortable to learn, create and build positive relationships and express themselves. Safe spaces were one parent of a woman with disabilities said was a space that was the “Lifeline and glue that held her daughter’s life together”.

I have visited organisations that work for young people and families that need extra support. The young people that go off the radar. The forgotten young people from areas that don’t seem to have the same privilege and opportunity as the ’other places’. They don’t have the same schools, the same hospitals and doctors, the same transport links, the same access to food or even the same treatment by the police. I have worked with organisations that try and try to give these young people some extra opportunity, some extra support and in some cases even financial support for their participation. I have worked with organisations that are working hard to re-establish the arts back into schools. I have worked with organisations that offer a platform to the community through the Arts – whether that’s through voice, through painting a mural, planning arts, through dance, theatre, photography and film. And I have worked with organisations that reconnect people to the natural world around us to help develop and maintain a positive mental health and wellbeing.

Throughout all of this, I have learnt that it is the Community Artist that facilitates this. I have learnt the power of an artist using their passion and talent to support and creatively nurture the people within local communities, offering them a family, a friendship network, a new perspective and a new perspective.

From this, I have learnt about the importance to pursue the training and development of artists within the community. To champion the artist as the medium between educational, government, authority systems and our local communities.

I have learnt about the value that must be put on a community artists’ work and the power that the arts have in transforming people’s lives. One of the key points of the Wallace Foundation report from Say Si was to value the arts and value the development of the arts within their community. The other key point was to provide relevant training, development and support the artistic practice of the arts pedagogues delivering the sessions, workshops. With the arts being cut and suffering in educational systems – arts practice within the community must bridge this gap – for this the deliverers of the arts need to develop not only their community practice but also maintain and develop and push the boundaries of their own practice in order for their own work and consequently their community work not becoming stale.

During the Scholarship I have delivered a number of sessions and seminars where I focused my delivery towards my work as a community artist. I wanted to talk to the young people and hopefully inspire them towards seeing community art as a career path. I have been approached by Nottingham Trent University to do a talk to their Youth & Community BA Students in January 2019, where I intend on talking about the above and also the importance of community artists and leaders to explore social and racial injustice.

My plans post the scholarship are to bring together artists from within Nottingham and show my documentary alongside a talk and then an open discussion. I also want to launch C.A.N (Community Artist Network) and build a database of artists, running ’creative’ days where groups of multi-discipline artists come together and take on various arts challenges. For my work at the YMCA the scholarship has provided  me a wealth of ideas and plans for potential projects and programs that I will be working towards trying to develop and integrate into our department.

Throughout my travels, I used a service called Servas to connect and find hosts within the United States. Servas International is a not-for-profit, non-governmental federation of national Servas groups, encompassing an international network of hosts and travellers. The purpose of the network is to help build world peace, goodwill and understanding by providing opportunities for personal contacts among people of different cultures, backgrounds and nationalities.

Servas ended up being the glue that held my Scholarship and travels together. Throughout the trip, I stayed with 7 different Servas hosts. Every host was absolutely amazing and so hospitable to my visit. They not only hosted me but all of the hosts actively helped me in the planning of my scholarship, connecting with a range of local organisations. All of my hosts really did treat me like family. They introduced me to local foods, introduced me to their friends and family and also took me to all the best local attractions, things to see and community events.

Overall being able to visit so many organisations and also being given the opportunity to deliver workshops and talks throughout the scholarship has boosted my confidence and also my vision for myself as community arts, artists and personalities. Navigating through the States, organisations transport, travel, accommodations and all of the visits has shown that my project management, time management and also my perseverance and passion to push through and to complete a task – is a lot stronger than I give myself credit for. It has refreshed my ambitions and passions for striving towards helping people and pushing for change, equality, social/racial justice and environmental issues. At the beginning of the scholarship, before I had even travelled to the States we got the opportunity to visit County Hall and also to meet the Mayor. This introduction to local politics is something that I would like to get more involved in. The scholarship has inspired me and opened up a new passion for local politics, something that on a national and global level I have always shied away from, as I didn’t believe in one voice being able to make the change. I now see that with the work I deliver and passion I have for supporting and working for various communities, local politics would be a great area for me to explore where we can make direct changes to issues right in front of us.