Julie Collins - James Lee House, Warrington

• Julie is a basic skills tutor
• She likes to let people tell their own stories
• Julie was employed through the local college with LSC funding until July but that funding ended and she was made redundant. The Salvation Army have stepped in but it is very difficult to develop new projects as she only receives a small amount of funding which doesn’t offer any time to develop new projects.
• She has found residentials to be very successful as it brings out another side in people. Last year the residents of James Lee House went on 3 residentials.
• What has been successful is looking reflectively at their lives, feelings and ideas and about how they felt about homelessness.
• One project they undertook was a simple photography project where they turned negative into positive
• They have also done a lot of one off photography, poetry, pottery and sculpture projects
• The local art gallery invited service users to take part in the Japanese Festival, which was very successful and so they were asked back the following year for the Spanish Culture Festival.
• Service users decided on a project focussing on ‘journey’s’ and as part of that they developed a photography project that involved 10 service users going to Barcelona.
• It was very successful with one service user saying “things like this don’t happen to us”
• For the people who went it was life changing – 3 are now in college, 3 are working, 1 is still struggling
• After a successful exhibition in Warrington they were invited to exhibit in Barcelona and only agreed if they could go back out themselves, which they did. This project was funded through the arts council.