Wednesday 8 July 2015
This blog was written by Laura, one of our Heritage Volunteers
Today we carried on from last week’s session, reading through the organisation’s case studies in our three groups, with each group being given a different year of cases. My group looked at the cases printed in the annual report for 1876 – the organisation’s first full year of existence.
One of the cases for this year involved a "Hindoo, speaking very little English, who had been left at Liverpool by the American captain who had brought him over". Another applicant was a "young woman with three children, who stated that she had been deserted by her husband, and had come from Manchester to Nottingham to find him."
Our task was to separate the clients into different categories, and to see if any patterns occurred. We all found that people living with physical disabilities seemed to be the people engaging with the organisation as prospective clients most often.
In the last hour we talked more about what wanted the theme of our upcoming performance to be. We discussed how we could engage an audience that might have little prior knowledge of the subject, and identified some pitfalls and potential missed opportunities that we wanted to avoid. It seems that we’ve reached a general agreement on what the performance will involve, based around the Nottingham Charity Organisation Society’s original aims and objectives.