Hello, my name is Courtney Anslow, and I have been working with the Limerick Lifelong Learning Festival for a number of months now. I am also on a CE Scheme with Limerick City Partnership as a receptionist and I was given the opportunity to work on the Festival and I would like to share my experience and thoughts on what it has been like.
I first started back in January. I did not know what to expect from it, but I knew I had a passion for lifelong learning and wanted to involve myself with the project as that’s the main theme that the festival promotes. I wanted to see what it was all about as when I was younger and left school at 16; I had no idea what was out there for me to do aside from mainstream college, and I actually ended up hating being there. I wish I had known what other options I had, like the Limerick Youth Service for example. Even as I read the old brochures from the festival as an adult I had no idea what St Saviours offered, Women’s Collective – Limerick and the Southill Hub, just to name a few.
I attended various meetings during the festival preparations, all showing me new insights into what the festival is all about, what the various organizations do and the kinds of people that I would be working with. I have met so many different people, namely the Chairperson, the Mayor, representatives from the colleges, and many more. They all showed me different outlooks and perspectives on what they could provide for the festival. It was nice to meet fresh faces and be involved in the creative process behind the sub-themes and ideas of the festival.
I was tasked with sorting out the events that came in for a rough copy of the brochure. It was my job to make sure they were sorted into the right day/s, the times were correct and all the information was necessary, making sure the contact information was correct also. After that, it was then my job to make sure all the links were working correctly. I also had to organise all the photos and posters sent to me regarding events. I was also in charge of the social media posts, categorising a spreadsheet with evaluation feedback, attendance figures and event types, sending out emails with surveys and trying to get analytics, and I created various videos on Canva using event photos for the festival. I also was involved in drafting the festival evaluation report and analysing the data. If you were to ask me what my favourite task was, however, it would be hard to choose as I equally enjoyed creating videos and doing the social media posts. They both gave me a lot of creative freedom and allowed me to zone out for a while and not think about everything and anything. Picking the music for videos and the order of which images the videos showed was also enjoyable. The end cards and title screens were the most fun. With social media it was nice to be able to promote what the events were and seeing how creative everyone else was.
I learned a lot over the course of the work I did but I mainly learned how to be less anxious when talking to people as I had a lot of social interaction. It also taught me how to use Canva and be creative which is one of the more interesting things I have ever done. I also learned how to be confident as with every passing meeting I started speaking up and sharing my ideas which in turn translated into me speaking up about other situations within the workplace. For example I spoke up about my desire to work with SICAP and pursue a career in it which has now given me opportunity to gain experience with them.
I didn’t encounter many challenges, however sometimes I would forget an event to put in here and there or misspell a name but that was resolved at the end of the day when I would do a final overview of the document. Sometimes it was difficult wanting to finish a project but not having the images or the means to do, I resolved this by focusing on other tasks and being more patient.
I attended 3 of the events during the festival, the ‘Standards of Community Work’, ‘Open Mic’ community event and ‘Our Learning, Our Stories’. Each event was wonderful. The ‘Standards of Community Work’ event gave me a better insight into community work and sparked a bigger interest than I originally had in it. The Our Learning, Our Stories’ event let me be introduced to other organisations that do various activities and courses around limerick and the Open Mic event encouraged me to go public with personal poetry that I had kept private for over a year. The Open Mic was my favourite event as all the people there that loved my poems and asked me to read others and to get involved in creative writing classes in the future.
After that event people have consistently come to me to still tell me how much they enjoyed my writing so I will continue to pursue my writing through the coming months since it had such a great outlook and I am looking forward to possibly taking up creative writing classes later in the year. I have since wrote many other poems touching on real life topics and my own experiences that I hope to one day share with the world to assist those who may have went through what I did or felt the same way as me.
I had the opportunity also to visit the Women’s Collective – Limerick and see what they had to offer and through them I found out that they have a community work course that I would be interested in looking into further if my life in my CE scheme allows for it. As working in the community is something I would love to do as assisting people has always been my passion.
All in all, I have enjoyed the festival and not for a second regretted partaking in it; it has opened my eyes to so many organisations and people and places I had never even heard of that I now want to explore. I would recommend partaking in the festival to anyone as it was a very enjoyable experience and gave me a fresh outlook on organisations, events I could partake in, and it makes me excited for the next festival and what it will have to offer.
Share this on...