Glasgow Women’s Library’s AGM was held on Wednesday 26th November at our Parnie Street home. Friends, supporters, learners, staff, volunteers and Board members alike enjoyed a relaxed and positive meeting and were in celebratory mood as we reflected on the past year at GWL.
Twenty nine people attended and a further twenty three sent their apologies.
Dorothy McLelland, Chair of the GWL Board of Directors, outlined another exciting and successful year for GWL, reporting that in our core activities, we saw the consolidation and further development of the projects that form the heart of our work: the Lifelong Learning Programme, Adult Literacy and Numeracy Project and Black and Minority Ethnic Women’s Project.
Learning at GWL
The Lifelong Learning Programme, with its continuing key themes of Living Histories and Active Citizenship, is as innovative and popular as ever, directed by Adele Patrick and supported by Laura Dolan. In the last year we saw an increase in direct learners to 747 – an increase of nearly 20% on the previous year, with no increase in our funding! (The cost is a mere £30 per learner over the course of the year).
The work of GWL’s Women Make History project continues to thrive and inspire, with its West End Women’s Heritage Walks once again being sold out at the West End Festival, and delivered to a number of groups and international conference delegates by request.
We also developed a walk on ‘Women and the Abolitionist Movement’, commissioned by the WEA, and have now been commissioned to create a walk on ‘Women and the Merchant City’. A further walk on ‘Women in the Necropolis’ will be developed next year in partnership with the Friends of the Necropolis. The Women Make History volunteers are developing a DVD and continue to work extremely hard on the project, and we would like to thank each one of them, especially Kirsty, Jean, Valaine and Anne.
We offered workplace learning and placement opportunities to 18 women this year from a diverse range of organisations such as Rosemount Lifelong Learning Centre and Strathclyde University.
We are very pleased that such is the success of our Lifelong Learning Project that the Scottish Government is funding GWL until 2011 to start to deliver some aspects at national level – this work will start next year.
The Adult Literacy Project, developed by Kay McKie and Pauline Healy provides one-to-one and group learning to women who want to develop and improve their reading, writing, spelling or number work.
The project worked with 82 learners during the year on individual learning plans designed to ensure that the learners set their own goals and determine how they can make a lasting difference to their own lives.
We are very proud to be one of three finalists short listed for an award in the Student Learning category at the Scottish Further Education Unit Awards for our joint project work with Stow College and the Wayside Homeless Centre, where we have been providing ALN support to learners undertaking an Introduction to Social Care course. At the Awards ceremony on 25th November, we were ‘commended’ in the most competitive category, with over 90 entries submitted to the overall competition.
The BME Project has flourished during the year under the development of Syma Ahmed, working with 357 learners and 14 BME women volunteers. Our partnership with Langside College sees the provision of ESOL (English Speakers of Other Languages) Classes to an additional 90 women per week.
The collection of migrant women’s stories, oral histories, intergenerational studies and reminiscence projects have all been central to our work and other events include film nights, discussions, story telling and performance.
GWL Development
At strategic level, GWL secured further funding from the Scottish Government to enable us to continue to progress GWL’s formal adoption of national status as Scotland’s only Women’s Library and we are working with Museums Galleries Scotland to achieve status as a Recognised Collection of National Significance.
Importantly, this year saw first major funding award towards relocation to the Mitchell Library, in the form of our Heritage Lottery Fund grant.
The GWL Team
It was with great sadness that this year saw the resignation of Val Atkinson from the Board of Directors in order to pursue study at Glasgow School of Art and we would like to thank Val for her input into GWL’s work and wish her every success.
We continue to build a happy, strong and confident GWL team and feel confident that, with the continued involvement of our volunteers, users, learners, supporters and partners, we can realise our vision for the future – we look forward to another exciting, challenging and successful year ahead.
Some latest developments are included in a new issue of GWL News, and the Annual Report will be available in January.
GWL’s Strategic Development Manager, Sue John, updated the meeting on our relocation developments and the necessary remaining formal business was undertaken, with the re-election of the Board and re-appointment of GWL’s Auditors.
Sue John then launched GWL’s new Women on the Shelf initiative and concluded that support for GWL has never been more crucial than at this time as she encouraged everyone to become Friends of GWL and to support our Women on the Shelf initiative.
Refreshments were served as we all enjoyed watching (again!) GWL’s appearance on ‘Reporting Scotland’ in July and saw a presentation of images of the many GWL events from the past year.
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