A note on Term 3 workshops
11 Jun 2015
While the Sydney Story Factory welcomes all young people, it was set up with the primary focus of working with marginalised young people, particularly those from Indigenous and non-English speaking backgrounds. To make sure we continue to fulfil this mandate, we have decided to make some changes to our after-school and holiday classes.
This coming term, we have been very fortunate in extending our existing local partnerships to more community organisations. We will be working with the National Centre of Indigenous Excellence, the Yurungai Barnados Learning Centre, Redfern Community Centre, Weave, The Settlement and some of the local primary schools.
This means that in Term 3 a lot of our regular workshops spaces will be reserved for students from these community groups. This means fewer spaces for open bookings and we’re aware this might disappoint some of you. However we hope you understand that it’s important we direct our resources to the marginalised students who can most benefit from our programs, and who have fewer opportunities to participate in similar programs elsewhere.
We are doing a lot more workshops at local schools next term, including Alexandria Park, Darlington, Plunkett St, Bourke St, Our Lady of Mt Carmel and Redfern Jarjum College to name just a few. We know we’ll be seeing many of our regular students in these workshops.
The workshops we have free spaces in are listed in the What’s On section. Please keep in mind these workshops are all term-length, so please only sign your child in if he or she is able to come for the full term. As we have limited places, they will book up quickly, so we apologise in advance if you miss out. We’re happy to add your children to waiting lists in case of any pre-term cancellations.
On the plus side, we have just launched a new Pen Pal Program! This is an email-based program whereby students can email through their stories, scripts, poetry and other forms of creative writing, and receive detailed feedback from trained volunteers and editors. It’s a little like having a workshop experience without being here. We hope that this service – which is free of charge – will help ease the disappointment of anyone who misses out on a workshop this term.
As always, if you have any questions at all please don’t hesitate to get in touch, and we look forward to reading your children’s work either in person at the Martian Embassy, or through the Pen Pal Program soon!