Create Friends & Family Holiday Programme

What Create Friends & Family Holiday Programme did

We have provided a dedicated Family Programme for children and young people with disabilities and their friends and families, offering 22 Family Fun sessions and 4 social outings for families. Additionally we have supported families to structure quality activities at home which all the family can take part in, through the distribution of goody bags containing visual arts materials and worksheets, relating to the activity delivered for that days workshop.

We delivered 12 monthly family fun workshops from our fully accessible and specially equipped venue at Trongate 103. These activities included tie dying, weaving, printing, foam marbling, plaster casting and card making.

We hosted 4 special outing events to Pollock Park and the Burrell Collection, Scotland Street School and two Codasign workshops, a specialist organisation making coding and electronics accessible as a visual arts tool.

We delivered 10 family fun sessions over the school summer and October holidays, including film making, which were delivered for the first time to family groups.

Activities were advertised through our paper mailing list for current and recent participants and those who want to be kept up to date on current activities, via our email mailing system, through our website and social media channels, via local support agencies and websites and through poster campaigns in ASN schools in Glasgow. Workshop places were given on a first come first served basis.

The programme was predominantly delivered by two of Project Ability's highly experienced sessional Art Tutors. The children and their families and friends took part in a series of visual arts workshops and activities ranging form 1.5-2hrs (dependent on activity) to day long outings.

Each visual arts activity was tailored to provide an engaging programme which was fully accessible whilst remaining challenging and dynamic for everyone involved.

What Project Ability has learned

Our goody bags have been a particular success with the families who have taken part so far with many of the families telling us how much it has helped having a ready-made, hassle free structured arts activity pre-packaged for them and how much the children and young people have enjoyed working on these at home.

We have also introduced for the first time film making to some of our friends and family workshops, in addition to our usual arts and craft activities, and this has been hugely successful in introducing new families to the Friends and Family Fun programme who may not have otherwise taken part.

Workshops have been well attended as we already had a small core group of families who were attending our monthly Friends and Family Fun Workshops and additional families have taken part in our holiday programme. The introduction of film making to our Friends and Family Programme for the first time has introduced new family groups to the programme who may otherwise not have attended.

As hoped the incidence of families booking for the workshops then failing to attend have been dramatically reduced from previous years and we attribute this to the introduction of a small fee of £5 per family, as outlined in our application, to secure their place on the workshop.