Donald McCombie (centre) with the UNISON writing competition judges
In his years working with UNISON member learning at Birmingham City branch, Donald McCombie has organised a huge range of creative activities. In this blog he talks about that.
I have always believed that within the membership of UNISON there lies a vast wealth of creativity. Mostly people are just lacking the opportunity to use their inherent gifts in a written form for prose, be it fact or fiction, storytelling, poem or song.
The concept of lifelong learning meeting with UNISON learning activities can provide the opportunity to facilitate that creativity for many members.
By taking an encouraging and positive approach at Birmingham Branch to both lifelong learning and creativity, we have engaged members in a variety of projects and activities that linked to Birmingham libraries (storytelling and poetry events), the Museum & Art Gallery collecting personal histories over the past 50 years, song writing and performing songs of human rights at a variety of venues as well as the activities of the Return to Learn and Women’s Lives course participants.
In this our 25th year we have committed to a number of unique events that will build upon previous creative activities.
A living history group has been formed to write down personal stories.
We are currently working on this year’s poetry, song and story events.
As Stevie Wonder wrote,
When you dwell in the positive your destination is the brightest star!
I am currently looking into the night sky.