Claire, Rachel and I started a project from scratch. 2 years ago, pretty much exactly the tree of us met at mine with a wierd notion that we were supposed to do something together! Well Me and Rachel had met up for a coffee as she was living in Gillingham and ondereing what to do next and was up in Sheffield for the weekend. We'd maybe met once before. I think I suggested that she should move back to Sheffield and we should do something. Well very bravely she did just that. Though there was really nothing more to it than that a freind mentioned to Claire that we were thinking of doing something together and she got really excited and when I bumped into her at the Dore Gala in 2005 I could sense her excitement and asked her round. we didn't know what we were talking about but I think that each of us had been feeling that God had a plan for us... that we'd been feeling ready for for a long time but did not have the people around to do it with. Me and Claire tried to meet every week just to pray together and we kept in touch with Rachel in Gillingham. On August the 9th the three of us met together.
The first part of the puzzle was the easiest to work out. Rachel was on a creative ats team in Gillingham and loved it but didn't get to do enough performing. Claire is a trained dancer and had been feeling that she was ready after having her second child that she wanted to go back into it. I am a singer and have been in bands before but had just been doing odd bits of recording here and there, I'd been songwriting but with no real purpose or agenda so was drifting a bit. I knew that I wanted to develop my music but didn't want to do it on my own I just couldn't find the right people. So we decided to push forward and form some sort of group.
As we met and got to know each other we just became great friends and in our openness with each other we naturally drifted to talking about self esteem and how feeling little self worth through parts of our lives had affected us and caused us to make choices that had damadged us or just caused us to go through hard times. Our vision grew out of this and we became really passionate about taking a message of self worth to young girls in Sheffield. It is amazing how nasty words, lack of support and absence of encouragement has an affect on a person and I know I can still fall into the pit of remembering something that has hurt me that was never intended to but has had a lasting impression and has even changed the way I think and held me back from having the confidence to do the things I should be doing.
We therefore launched GoldDigger. We worked on our songs and performance and committed to working 2 days a week. Claire and I are married and our families live off our husbands wages. This was hard to do as I had to give up earning £100 a week which helped us loads to earning nothing in a job that had no money for even its own budget. Rachel supports herself with a part time job the rest of the week. Not only were we working for free we also were having to plough the few pennies we had spare into resourcing the project.
We had days a week, had to find free childcare and occasionally bring Claires or my children along to work and had to spread those 2 days between songwriting, recording, coreography, practicing, writing our girls course material and schools lessons,researching, fundraising including trying to set up as a registered charity and taking performances and teaching opportunities. It has been a busy, frustrating, amazing, slow, painful and beautiful process. Rachel through all the planning of the girls course always used to say 'oh imagine when we have all our sessions planned and we can keep all the resources in a box on our shelves in our office with a label on sand we can just pick it up and go' well we don't have shelves, or an office but yesterday we bought those boxes! The course is finished and we start the first one of the 8 week courses in less than a week. It's looking as though the first on will be all booked up too which is amazing for youth work! People have listened to our vision in the last 2 years and trusted us with their own money and we have a budget for the course and can manage to setup what we need to. We are almost a registered charity, have a board of trustees, and yesterday I think I realised how far we had come. I cried when I was refunded some postage costs for some material from Ebay for session 3 and I noticed that we'd ended up spending less than we'd budgeted for. We're still not getting paid and it is still a struggle and we are in need of a van and an office but I know that God has been amazing to us so far - i know that he has connected us with a group of girls that really need this course and I just can't wait to invest that time on getting to know them and really challanging some of these issues that they are going through. It you read this and you are someone who is willing to pray, please ask Jesus to do powerful things on this course. It starts this Thursday 7th June.
The first part of the puzzle was the easiest to work out. Rachel was on a creative ats team in Gillingham and loved it but didn't get to do enough performing. Claire is a trained dancer and had been feeling that she was ready after having her second child that she wanted to go back into it. I am a singer and have been in bands before but had just been doing odd bits of recording here and there, I'd been songwriting but with no real purpose or agenda so was drifting a bit. I knew that I wanted to develop my music but didn't want to do it on my own I just couldn't find the right people. So we decided to push forward and form some sort of group.
As we met and got to know each other we just became great friends and in our openness with each other we naturally drifted to talking about self esteem and how feeling little self worth through parts of our lives had affected us and caused us to make choices that had damadged us or just caused us to go through hard times. Our vision grew out of this and we became really passionate about taking a message of self worth to young girls in Sheffield. It is amazing how nasty words, lack of support and absence of encouragement has an affect on a person and I know I can still fall into the pit of remembering something that has hurt me that was never intended to but has had a lasting impression and has even changed the way I think and held me back from having the confidence to do the things I should be doing.
We therefore launched GoldDigger. We worked on our songs and performance and committed to working 2 days a week. Claire and I are married and our families live off our husbands wages. This was hard to do as I had to give up earning £100 a week which helped us loads to earning nothing in a job that had no money for even its own budget. Rachel supports herself with a part time job the rest of the week. Not only were we working for free we also were having to plough the few pennies we had spare into resourcing the project.
We had days a week, had to find free childcare and occasionally bring Claires or my children along to work and had to spread those 2 days between songwriting, recording, coreography, practicing, writing our girls course material and schools lessons,researching, fundraising including trying to set up as a registered charity and taking performances and teaching opportunities. It has been a busy, frustrating, amazing, slow, painful and beautiful process. Rachel through all the planning of the girls course always used to say 'oh imagine when we have all our sessions planned and we can keep all the resources in a box on our shelves in our office with a label on sand we can just pick it up and go' well we don't have shelves, or an office but yesterday we bought those boxes! The course is finished and we start the first one of the 8 week courses in less than a week. It's looking as though the first on will be all booked up too which is amazing for youth work! People have listened to our vision in the last 2 years and trusted us with their own money and we have a budget for the course and can manage to setup what we need to. We are almost a registered charity, have a board of trustees, and yesterday I think I realised how far we had come. I cried when I was refunded some postage costs for some material from Ebay for session 3 and I noticed that we'd ended up spending less than we'd budgeted for. We're still not getting paid and it is still a struggle and we are in need of a van and an office but I know that God has been amazing to us so far - i know that he has connected us with a group of girls that really need this course and I just can't wait to invest that time on getting to know them and really challanging some of these issues that they are going through. It you read this and you are someone who is willing to pray, please ask Jesus to do powerful things on this course. It starts this Thursday 7th June.
No comments:
Post a Comment