North Birmingham Community Arts

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These are the new times for meeting at the
610 Community Centre In Kingstanding .

Directions are below .

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J's Masks - NO 2 being painted . The Toilet Paper Tribe ..

Erdington Arts Group Alliance has formed and has its first meeting 15th July 2008 . NBCA has helped it into existence by brokering the use of a room at the Rookery House in Rookery Park Erdington. The E.A.G.A. Group is new and will need to find its feet but already the rent for the room is paid for on a member contribution basis . The fate of Rookery House appears to be changing in the future (Oct 2008 ?) with a lease situation being set up and a "Friends" committee looks likely to have charge of that and the running of the Rookery House...We did a short film today just to record who was there and how we all "mucked in" to get things going .

It is unlikely that we will automatically open EAGA to mental health Service Users unless they are really recovered enough and are actually doing working arts because this EAGA group consists of mainstream artists and practitioners whose aim it is to partly support themselves .

NBCA sees a potential however for some training for anyone in the future (digital photoshop media) to occur through the EAGA connection because of other routes that are still being cultivated through Erdington connections . More on this later ..

SIX WAYS HERDINGTON

NBCA designs local cards & arts and sells the product to raise finance to keep our venue going at the 610 centre so decent biscuits and tea can be consumed while creating arts practice for our members

Get in touch at :

nbca@blueyonder.co.uk

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Co-Promoting Vesey Arts & Crafts And Our Charity Work At NBCA

Vesey Arts & Crafts is an arts and design-centre shop in our North Birmingham locality. North Birmingham Community Arts (NBCA) who meet at the 610 Centre Kingstanding exists to create a venue for arts expression and fellowship for people recovering or suffering from mental illnesses, post trauma problems and depressions of various types .

We aim to do this openly because we want people to accept there is place for damaged people to be "held in mind" positively

Part of our NBCA remit is to deliberately promote locality and local businesses because this enables them to help us whilst we co-promote and get some support . This year we will become a small charity and this short film has a number of positive layers of our intentions built into it - to create support all around for others and ourselves .. Its also a simple exercise in digital film and voice that we will show to our members over time to help them create expressions of their own ..

For details of how to get to the 610 Centre in Kingstanding
See below . See also our Year-film and other films further below like the
"Highcroft Lifebook Film" and the Rotheram Social Care Direct Payments Enabling film under this text. The Rotheram film shows 6 good practice examples of how to help Mental Health Users truly shape their own services using special payments if you have trouble seeing it go to this

LINK CLICK HERE

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This Film Below Is An Experiment

The 610 Year 2007 Version 3.wmv

Posted to Birmingham Mental Health Media And Arts by silvisrivers on November 28, 2007

Click to Play View Details

This is a brief film about what we did from 2006 - 2007 Oct-November the end of our grant year . Its only shows a small amount of what we did and the biscuit eating quotient was much higher. There's also a film made by Si too below and don't forget the "Highcroft Lifebook Film" is below both and is still available for £10... We sold a few for sure and some cards to sustain our group and we got spammed a lot because of this Blog but hell who cares we'll send them all used biscuits....

The full DVD video of two more sections showing how to make books on a jig is available for £10 (plus post & packing) to Mental Health organisations and groups.

Cheques can be made payable to "North Birmingham Community Arts" a Mental Health User-led Arts volunteer group that functions to create a venue for arts practice and fellowship as well as trying to increase the art-voice of MH User-artists. We can consider other methods like BACS for payment too ...

For more details contact :

nbca@blueyonder.co.uk

or: info@nbca.co.uk .

NBCA is also in alliance with the

"Highcroft Lifebook Project"

And its aims

It will also be possible to purchase actual examples of the "Highcroft Lifebook" and we will consider a price on that in the near future - we are currently getting to grips with some new more complex printing in colour-fast and waterproof ink.

Bear with us .

Our End User Agreement with Service Users and groups informally using our methods, is that is fine, but if Groups or others want to use our methods formally for grant based training or other revenue related purposes then we regard our ideas as our intellectualy property and will need to be contacted for consultation .

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From the City Centre the bus arrangements are :
From Dale End : (Stand De)
934 runs every 15 mins
934a runs every 15 mins
993 Half hourly services at 7 mins past and 37 mins past the hour

From Sutton Coldfield the 451 goes to the "Circle" at Kingstanding . Then its a case of walking
down on the library side of the Kingstanding Road toward "town direction" You'll see the
Centre about a quarter of a mile on. SEE the map : scroll down below

Queries to : nbca@blueyonder.co.uk Also

June_Galbraith@birmingham.gov.uk Tel :

For Times : See Below

Dates of 610 Art Practice Meetings (all Thursdays ) :

Part of the 2007 programme is simple drop in Art Practice Sessions and we will be creating film promotions and post card promotions of the NBCA group with both User-arts and the locality itself where our experience is rooted. We want to try and capture Highcroft Hospital Experiences in varying forms of User-voice and arts . Two of us are quite experienced at either technical sides of photo production or narrative building in different forms .. We are still at crawling stages on some of this and it will take time to get to exhibtion stage for members and we will look locally at some collaboration with those who want to co-operate and innovate ..

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At N.B.C.A. we want to develop a distinctive funny style that's locality flavoured in terms of our promo-kards. Its not fair the IRON MAN in the Birmingham City Centre should have all the attention. Its obvious to us there should be an Iron Kat in every locality to secure its artistic identity. We will help with that aim ! And ofcourse promote ourselves and mental health arts practice at the 610 Community Centre ..

THE POSITION OF NORTH BIRMINGHAM COMMUNITY ARTS Dec 2006

We have some £5300 + in our NBCA account thanks mainly to Awards For All and we will be purchasing a number of means of ways to create "Voice" through the arts and historical narratives . Part of our our plan is to create the opportunity to move towards both handmaking books (at simple levels) at a group practice and to put ourselves and members into a position whereby by using certain types of some licensed software (to NBCA as a Group) we would be able to substantially reduce outsourcing printing costs to promote people's works in books - we would create control of the more expensive "proof costs" by inputing our own skills ..

We therefore want to try to be flexible in our approach from creating simple means to achieve simple books that portfolio expressions of poetry , writing , arts , photo's to challenge folk into ordering their experience the best way they feel they can, and we want where possible to help others move on to more complex delivery of the human story of having mental health difficulties ..

If our some of our members do not wish to express their lives in any way that talks about mental health issues that will be fine with us...

We will not as a Group though, be fearful of using the terms "mental health difficulties" etc - but we will embrace the way we deal with matters by demonstrating these things are part of the overall and more tragic side of the broader human condition that has to join into social discourse.

We will have a filming arm for the Group and we do have some local historical experience to gather and make a into human narratives about Mental Health ..

Already , we will plan to sustain ourselves beyond the coming year of 2007 - 8 into 2008 - 9 It is essential to maintain a basic place of practice and fellowship and we envisage that to be the 610 Community Centre in Kingstanding .

We are genuinely User-led and have been financed and set up completely by ourselves . It needs to be said that this was an outgrowth of seeing Mental Health Services being diminshed by Govt and the NHS, together with a feeling that we are more on our own often than we have ever been . Some of us feel there was a "Highcroft Mental Hospital type community " in Birmingham North and that has been badly fragmented by change .

We will remember our friends and colleagues from those Highcroft days and we will seek to enshrine some memory of them in what we do in NBCA .

We will look for some expansion in the future and some people with organisational ability to create other arms of practice that compliment our efforts .

Our next 3 sessions at the 610 Community Centre in Kingstanding are

14th December 2006 12 - 3.00 p.m.

(Closure for Xmas Holiday)

January 7th 2007
January 18th 2007

The directions are on one of our flickr.com resources areas HERE

NBCA Treasurer ...

NBCA had its AGM with plenty of cake and sandwiches on 30th November. 9 people attended mostly members though we did have one Trainee Social Worker who found the afternoon interesting and one attendee who unfortunately went past their bus-stop and had to walk back to the centre ..

WE aim to put forward some plans soon about what we are doing in the new year and how we might benefit different members with types of activities

And there will more to announce here after the 9th December 2006....