Katie Rutter
If you didn’t experience the effects of loneliness during the past year and a half, you are part of an incredibly undersubscribed club. While there will be those who recall the various lockdowns we have experienced with rose-tinted glasses – whimsically harking back to long days reading in the sun or attempting a new flavour combination of banana bread – for others, the deafening loneliness they felt casts a dark shadow over the glimpses of light which others choose to frame lockdown with. Now take this loneliness and imagine you’re living alone, potentially without access to social media and the Netflix subscriptions which acted as a balm to our social isolation. According to Age UK, 1.2 million older people in England are chronically lonely and 49% of those aged over 65 report television or a pet as their main form of company. The study also found that over 6 million older people say that just a few minutes of conversation makes a difference to their week. Just a few minutes.
WeCraft is a new social enterprise project which hopes to remedy this social isolation and consequent loneliness through our creative workshop. Following our launch, we will host a weekly workshop which encourages a community atmosphere and offers an opportunity for bridging the well-trodden disconnect between the student and local communities.
I joined WeCraft earlier this year when it was in its infancy and it was initially going to be a furniture upcycling workshop where we would sell the upcycled items to fund the project. However, we have decided that WeCraft should be a more flexible space. We want to create an outlet for creatives in Durham, both student and non-student, who want to share their skills and interests with others. Workshops will vary greatly in regard to their content; we will offer classes on still life drawing and readings of original poetry to discussion sessions accompanied by tea and cake. We are looking for student volunteers who want to get involved and pitch the workshops they wish to run to us.
However, the set up will not be as simple as students leading workshops which members of the local community attend. Rather, we hope that as the project gains traction and greater engagement with the local community in Durham, that the relationship between the student and local communities will become fluid as those attending the workshops can offer their skills and interests – prompting students to attend the workshops themselves. Hopefully this interweaving of the student and local communities in Durham will begin to heal the disengagement between them. We want to establish a community which offers an open space for conversation, creativity and collaboration. In the long run, we will establish a shop where we can sell the artwork, poetry anthologies and anything else we have collaboratively created in our workshop and this will allow the project to become self-sufficient.
We are hosting a launch event on the 28th of October in collaboration with Scoop at their space on the Riverwalk – a non-profit zero-waste food store. The event will act as a taster for what we will host in the future with three mini art workshops, tea and cake and will be an opportunity to sign up as a volunteer, to join our mailing list or to pitch an idea for a workshop you are interested in hosting.
