Volunteers Week

READING ROOMS

I’m proud to say I’m a volunteer with the Verbal Arts Reading Rooms

What’s that you might well ask?

It’s a creative shared reading project launched by James Kerr, the director of the Verbal Arts in Derry/Londonderry in 2013 and which under the creative core reading rooms team at the VCE is rapidly spreading to other parts of the North.

It’s a very simple thing.

Once a week an accredited volunteer facilitator, who loves to tell stories, meets and reads aloud with groups, as diverse as pupils, youth clubs, prisoners, pensioners and dementia groups.

Poetry and short stories range from Seamus Heaney to Shakespeare and everything of quality in-between – whatever is best suited to the group.

The important thing is not the literature but how a word or a phase stirs /sparks memories prompting the diverse group of participants to tell their own story.

That’s the core aim of the Reading Rooms – the read aloud storytelling that initiates conversation between the participation within the groups.

The conversation via the storytelling is key to building good mental well-being. And we can all do with a bit of that, can’t we?

Yesterday (Wednesday) along with my fellow volunteers, I was treated to a lovely lunch followed by an Open Reading Room and presented with my OCN Shared Reading Skills Certificate and a genuinely appreciative ‘Thank you for volunteering ’ from the Reading Room team.

Thanks, Andrea, Sinead, Susannah and all the rest of the ‘behind the scenes’ team.

It was a lovely day.