Just written our first bid for money!

That was an interesting experience! We have just completed and submitted our bid and will hear in late August whether we have been successful. With a couple of friends, I am part of a Team called Write Out Loud. This all began over a year ago now when we got some funding from BBC Voices....

BBC Voices Making History was formed in 2006 when author, Sue Welfare (BBC Radio's first ever Story Laureate for the BBC Radio Norfolk project 'This Norfolk Life') and two UEA lecturers, Andrea Rippon (School of Education & Lifelong Learning) and Mary-Jane Cullen (School of Literature & Creative Writing), devised a workshop enabling participants to use creative writing to tell their life stories. They delivered workshops, on behalf of BBC Voices, for a range of groups including young offenders, severely physically disabled people and women experiencing cancer. When BBC Voices funding ended, the Team continued with the same format and is now called Write Out Loud.

We've done one job since then and are hoping to get some funding to do some more. It's fantastic work - incredible to see how people realise that they do have something to say, they can communicate it and they can do it in such a way that people will listen.

Fingers crossed for a successful bid!