Our latest round of face to face Be Connected Digital Mentor training has just finished up at the end of November. Tik travelled to Bunbury, Kalgoorlie and Geraldton to deliver these three one day-long workshops to members of Museums and Galleries in and around regional, West Australian cities.
The partnership with AMaGA means that we have another peak body who we are working with to help promote to their memberships, with a view to building capacity in their volunteer organisations, to help train and support potential new volunteers in their museums, galleries or historical societies around regional communities.
Tik is enjoying the juxtapositions she’s finding in some of the spaces being offered by AMaGA Members – such as the old school room in the Bunbury Museum (in fact it may well be the very school room some of her ancestors went to school in in the early days of the West Australian colonies! Thanks to Nan sparking her interest in Family History research at an earlier Clubs Forum!).
AMaGA Members are currently in a digitisation phase – working with Collections WA to digitise their collections, making them available online for many more people to experience and enjoy. Thus the push to train digital mentors is a perfect opportunity for their members who are the ‘techy’ types to help spread the workloads around!
So far for this round, we have trained 25 of the required 50 Digital Mentors. The project started on September 1 and finishes on August 31, 2023, so we are well on the way to meeting the target.
This will give Tik and her new Digital Mentors as much follow up time as possible and she can capitalise on this by trying to encourage new groups to form in the West and NT. There have been some promising conversations with attendees at sessions to date!
Acknowledgment must go to the people on the ground in these towns, helping us by having the venue provided, the catering collected and delivered on time and marketing the sessions to their members and the wider communities. Thank you Bunbury Museum, Museum of the Goldfields, Geraldton Regional Library (incorporating the Historical Society) and Megan from Collections WA/AMaGA.
The next sessions in the pipeline will possibly be in Port Hedland, Broome, Albany or Esperance (or both) and in Perth again in the New Year – any deficit in numbers (and travel budgets) will be countered with Zoom delivery, so if you’re interested in attending the Zoom session – please email Tik to have your Club added to the notification list.
