Register to hold a class or take part in a Trade School Cardiff; the Trade School Cardiff page is up and running!
We need people to run classes for Trade School Cardiff- if you have skills, knowledge or experience that you can share with other people then please go to the Trade School Cardiff page and click register to teach
You can add a description of what you will be doing, a bit about yourself, choose a time and day and list what you would like in exchange for your class.
Once classes have been approved then other people can sign up to take part in them, so we need people to get their ideas on the Trade School Cardiff page as soon as possible!
If you would like to run a class but are a bit nervous of teaching, we have volunteers who can offer support and help you to put your class together. Just let us know.
If you need any help with registering, putting your class together, or would like more information, email laura.howe(at)ark-lab.co.uk
For some inspiration from past classes, have a look at Trade School New York
Last Thursday we had an initial meeting about running Trade School Cardiff. Trade School Cardiff will be running from May 12th-20th, which coincides with Adult Learners Week.
What is Trade School?
Trade School is an informal learning event at which those wishing to learn barter for the knowledge of those willing to teach.
Why Trade School?
Trade School puts a value on all type of knowledge, skills and experience. It promotes the belief that everyone has something valuable they can share with other people, and encourages learning and the exchange of ideas in an environment of mutual self respect.
How does Trade school work?
Anyone who wishes to share a skill or knowledge with a group of people registers to run a class in exchange for goods. Those wishing to learn bring along the goods required by the 'teacher'. Trade School Cardiff will have a special page on the Trade School website on which people can register classes or sign up for classes. Any type of skill, knowledge or experience can be shared as long as it is not about exploiting other people or the promotion of a business.
Who can get involved?
Everyone from any background, community or age group can get involved as long as they are prepared to respect everyone else taking part.
What kind of knowledge can you share at Trade School?
For anyone who's interested in getting involved in Trade School Cardiff, there will be an opportunity to put thoughts and ideas together next week on Thursday 12th of April. Come to the Owain Glyndwr pub on St. John St in Cardiff city centre from 7-9pm to find out more about the project and see how you or other people can get involved as organisers, teachers or learners.
It feels like Papergirl Cardiff only happened about a month ago and here we are already setting the wheels in motion for Papergirl Cardiff 2012...
The June event went fantastically well and everyone was really pleased with how people enjoyed taking part in the event, as well as the reactions of the people who received free artwork.
Working with Cycle Training Wales for the first time was brilliant, and with The Printhaus, who are an incredibly accommodating and helpful bunch, and overall it was great to be working and hanging out with a team of such nice people.
So...here we go again. This time, following the enthusiastic reactions in June, we are hoping to make Papergirl Cardiff even better. To do that we are going to need more help, more thoughts and more ideas. And we are going to need you.
I was asked a while back if I could think of some ‘inspirational women’ I know to speak at a local Cardiff event. To my dismay, I was stumped. So was the questioner, hence the question. We both sat there, humming and hawing. But as neither of us are Cardiff locals – we used this as an excuse, a poor one but an excuse nonetheless.
The lovely Geraldine kindly sent me this link It's a blog post about an idea for a tool that helps local communities share resources and reduce expenses using geolocation, interactive mapping and visualisation. It also mentions other interesting sites like:https://thesuperfluid.com/ Superfluid makes collaboration in social networks fair by enabling members to trade favors using a virtual currencyhttp://ushahidi.com/ Ushahidi is a non-profit tech company that develops free and open source software for information collection, visualisation and interactive mappingand discusses the possibility of using this software for organising community based initiatives.
Thanks to all the people who came to share their skills and talents last Wednesday night in CAI. Everyone seemed to have a good time, even if they didn’t come away with exactly what they were looking for!
The Travelling PantryLast Wednesday a couple of ARK regulars, including me, attended the Travelling Pantry, a project development workshop run by Tessy Britton, developed as part of the Social Spaces project, and hosted in Cardiff by RSA Cymru. Rather than looking at what a community's problems are and then trying to solve them, Tessy's approach to developing community projects is about working out what assets and resources a community has and then developing projects based on these assets. These asset-based projects can then help to address the problems that the community are experiencing by bringing people together, which is the first big step to community problem-solving.
Why not come along to our meeting on Wednesday evenings and see how you can get involved! Click here to view our calendar.
