The Windows Project
The Windows Project is a charitable trust,
registered by the Charities Commission in 1981. The trust was
established to
"...diffuse the knowledge and appreciation of language as a
creative medium, thus improving the facility in that language
...for those who have need by reason of their youth, age,
infirmity or social or economic circumstances."
(Extract
from deed of trust)
The Project was actually founded in 1976, following an
invitation to poets to create poetry workshops for Liverpool
playschemes. From this a game-based approach was evolved which,
as a working format, has proved successful not only in playschemes all over the region and beyond
but also, with subsequent developments, in
youth clubs, schools, libraries,
colleges,
day centres for elderly or disabled and residential
institutions for care or custody.
In the year to April 2010 the Project ran over 1000 sessions.
Of these, 54% were held in places not normally associated with
education, 17% were specifically directed to people with mental
or physical difficulties and 69% were for children and young
people in areas actually designated as being educationally
deprived.
Alongside these workshops the Project has sought in many other
ways to improve the availability of advice and assistance to
developing writers.
Run by writers with over thirty years experience of work in
the community, the Project provides opportunities for writers to train and work within the
community and workshops and information sessions to encourage and
assist teachers, librarians and others working in play or
community. It provides advice and guest writers to a variety of
writers' groups and runs open advice sessions in libraries. It
also provides advice by post and phone to a large number of
individual enquiries.
In addition to publishing a workshop manual,
which combines information on method with young peoples' writing, the Project publishes work in booklets from workshops
with people of all ages. It has published over forty Merseyside-based poets in booklet form
and provided either assistance or advice to enable many others.
The Project also produces the well respected Smoke magazine
; a publicity facility for local small press
publishing; and provides events, readings and talks by visiting writers.
