A busy start to the year when we welcomed home our beautiful Processions banner (now hanging in Dunbar Library). We then enjoyed a series of Art Therapy Workshops with local artist, Barbara Rowell, as well as our usual Chair Exercise/Relaxation sessions, Crafts and Bingo. We had a wonderful trip to Holyrood Palace, enjoyed poetry sessions and also raised £200 for Project Linus at one of our famed fundraising afternoon tea parties!
Our first outing of the year (in brilliant sunshine!) was to Holyrood Palace – a real ‘royal’ event in every sense of the word, in no small part to the lovely programme that had been arranged for us, and for the the kindness and thoughtfulness shown by all the staff. A lovely lunch followed in the Palace Cafe. The day was made possible thanks to Community Windpower/BeGreen, Dunbar.
Oh how lovely it was to be be able to get out and about again! In July 2022 we enjoyed a return visit to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh and in August, another return visit, this time for a barge trip with the Seagull Trust, Ratho. Happy Days! This was in addition to wonderful local outings to Amisfield Gardens, Belhaven Community Garden and The Backlands, Dunbar.
We finished off 2022 with a wonderful Christmas Lunch at Winterfield Golf Club, having enjoyed a variety of activities over the past 3 months: crafts, chair exercise, guest speakers, bingo and a fantastic Book Week Scotland event with Edinburgh poet Ken Cockburn (thanks to Sharing a Story CIC and the Scottish Book Trust).
We are delighted to be collaborating with local CIC, Sharing a Story on a new project – ‘Tales From Our Kitchen Table’.
Our good friend, Lorna Hill of ‘Sharing a Story CIC’ has been successful in attracting funding as one of 14 projects across Scotland to benefit from being involved in an exciting initiative from About Dementia, Age Scotland and The Scottish Government, aimed at providing community-based support for people affected by dementia.
Lorna Hill will be using this funding to run a series of interactive, inter-generational workshops for us on the theme of ‘Tales from Our Kitchen Table’. This will involve a lot of chatting, drinking tea, and cooking as well as sampling some lovely food (we are very, very good at this and can see just why Lorna chose our group to work with!!), while sharing memories of lovely meals, tastes and food experiences from the kitchen tables we have all enjoyed gathering around. We will also be joined by some lovely local youngsters. Our initial session was held on 9 December, with a full programme of events to follow in 2023.
Stories and recipes gathered from these sessions will be collated and used to create a follow-up to our very successful ‘Community Cookbook’ printed in 2020, which raised over £800 for our group funds.
On a separate project, we will be fortunate enough to be working once again with local artist Barbara Rowell at a series of workshops, entitled ‘Every Story Matters’. What fun! So much to look forward to.
