Reflection: Project Officer John Saich
For this first article in our ‘Reflections’ series, Storytelling associate Adil Iqbal sits down with Project Officer John Saich to reflect on his experience and journey on the Remembering Together programme.
Adil: Hi John, can you tell me a bit about your role within the Remembering Together programme, what does the project mean to you in a professional and personal sense?
Image credit: John Saich
John: I’m one of the two Project Officers, working part time and based in Argyll. I started working last June along with Kim (Programme Manager) and Carla (Project Officer) and between us and our advisory group we’ve built the framework of the programme, including how we communicate the core values and message of Remembering Together along with a learning programme for artists and partners.
In recent months much of my role has been about building relationships with local partners – culture trusts, third sector organisations, local authorities – and helping them shape their own responses to the commissioning process. We all agreed from the beginning that we needed to build strong foundations for a project that will inevitably touch people in very deep and different ways. This will shape our support for artists too, once the co-creation phase gets underway.
In a professional sense, I’ve loved having the opportunity to connect with such a wide range of people in many different parts of Scotland, and to explore this new project with them. I’ve been moved by how positive and creative their responses have been and although almost all this has been done online so far, I feel I know so much more about the places they live and work in than I ever did previously. It’s also wonderful to work with greenspace scotland whose approach to environment and wellbeing is something that resonates with me in many ways.
In a personal sense, the opportunity to help create something inspirational and caring beyond the pandemic, with a team of like-minded people, is something that means a lot to me. I’m so aware every day that Remembering Together has only happened because of something none of us would ever have wanted; but that in itself brings a kind of reverence for me, and responsibility of course.
Adil: How do you expect the project to evolve and grow over the next 6 months ?
John: The next few months will define the whole programme, as this is when the artists and creative practitioners will begin their co-creative work with communities. In that sense it’s an unknown for now – we’ve set out the parameters and developed our relationships with local partners, laid the foundations. How the artists will respond to the brief however is yet to be seen and it will vary widely in different part of Scotland. Some areas have many rural communities, others have islands, some are mostly urban.
It’s vital that we as a team don’t pre-judge what will be right or wrong in that sense. The right thing will be what those individuals and groups most affected by Covid bring to the process, and how they work with the artist to make whatever that is accessible to everyone. We know of course that there will be challenges, things to overcome we haven’t encountered yet. These challenges and unknowns will be there for the artists too so we’ll be making sure we have our support mechanisms in place for them. That’s why it’s been so important to get the building blocks of the programme in place before moving into the co-creation phase. Success, for want of a better word, in any arts project is a difficult thing to define. But we will be working hard to see that everyone involved learns something, that everyone is valued, listened to and supported and that our core values are applied across everything we do.
Adil: What learning and growth has the project meant for you?
John: Particularly in the early stages, I learned a great deal from my colleagues about the value of foundation building. In arts and cultural projects we are sometimes tempted to move ahead too quickly to make progress, but it has been so important to take the right amount of time with Remembering Together and to ask the right questions, to make sure we understand fully what we want to achieve. Also, to understand what we’re asking of partners and how we can support them. Our Programme Manager and full-time Project Officer both have such an extraordinary wealth of experience, I’m pretty sure I’ve learned something new from them every day!
The learning programme that runs as part of Remembering Together is very important. As a team and with other staff at greenspace scotland we have been working in an ‘action learning set’, a group-based way of solving problems using open questioning. We aim to introduce this to partners as we work through the programme. We have also spent a lot of time focusing on language associated with Remembering Together, for example how certain words and expressions that we might use freely in other situations may not be appropriate in this context. We have looked at how to develop a tone in our communications that is welcoming and supportive.
More widely we have learned from partners in various council areas how Covid has impacted certain groups in their communities, which in turn has helped to inform how the brief for artists has been developed.
I must mention too that coming from an arts and creative industries background, working with an organisation like greenspace scotland is a new experience for me. There is so much to learn from the knowledge and experience the team has built up over two decades. Natural environment and green spaces are very important to me and greenspace scotland’s innovative work in green energy and community placemaking is particularly inspiring.
John Saich is the lead officer for Remembering Together in Aberdeenshire, Dumfries & Galloway, East Lothian, East Renfrewshire, Highland, Inverclyde, Na h-Eileanan Siar, North Ayrshire and North Lanarkshire.
John works Tuesday - Thursday and can be reached on john.saich@greenspacescotland.org.uk.