The Future is Bright

Community Collaboration

“I am writing to let you know about an exciting project that the Billericay Primary Schools are involved in at the moment – a joint art exhibition in St Mary Magdalen Church from 22nd March to 23 April”.  So said Maureen Lee who is helping to organise the project for the Billericay Community Trust, “Can you help?”

When we learned what was involved we were delighted to help sponsor such an event, which echoes an Art Competition which we have previously run in Billericay for individual children.

The Future is Bright

In this 2019 project, children in all Primary Schools in the area are involved, amongst them our RotaKids clubs in the Quilters Federation and Buttsbury Junior School, but also, the school councils of Brightside Primary, South Green Juniors and Infants, Sunnymede Juniors and Infants, and Downham, Stock and St Peters Primary Schools.   The RotaKids, who are also the School Council in their schools, worked with School Councils of the other schools to develop a theme which would convey pride in their local area, encourage everyone to look after the environment and depict this in art form.    That theme is “The future is bright”.

The Community Trust also organised a local artist to work with each school on this communit y collaborative project.

About 200-250 children in all of these schools worked on a collaborative project within each school, and the results are on display in St Mary Magdalen church in Billericay High Street.

RotaKids Projects

The RotaKids worked together to brainstorm different ideas before finalising their ideas and working together to create the Art work.  The Quilters Exhibit was “A Year in Quilters”, an exploration of the school through the seasons, with children from each age group working in teams of 7 or 8 to focus on a separate season.  A poem and line drawing being at the heart of their exhibit.

The Buttsbury Exhibit was titled Playing in the Playground, a joint work showing children at play with an accompanying poem of the same title. 

Packed Preview

At the Preview, Kayleigh Suters and Maureen Lee made speeches of introduction to a packed hall, full of guests, children and proud parents, and then everybody had the opportunity to look around at the exhibits and appreciate all the hard work the children had done.

Quilters School RotaKids were also responsible for running the preview, approaching visitors to encourage them to buy artists’ postcards of the works, meet and greet, and hospitality.  They also filmed it for QTV, the school’s in-house TV channel.

Our donation was very well spent!