Monday 30 August 2010

Living Library at Sydney Children’s Festival


Carriage Works Living Library is looking for beautiful, interesting, inspiring books.
Many of you will remember that as part of the Sydney Children’s Festival last year, we ran a program called the ‘Living Library’. For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, see below:

In a Living Library, readers borrow out books in much the same way as they would in a traditional library, with one important difference – the ‘books’ are real people. The idea is that readers (in this case, the children of the Festival) can ‘borrow’ a book for a short amount of time to hear their personal story, enabling them to hear tales of people with lives very different from their own.

Right now, I’m looking for people of all ages, cultural backgrounds, and from all walks of life to be books. We’ll be enlisting kid’s ‘dream job’ people like firemen, doctors, vets and astronauts if we can find them, as well as people with quintessential ‘Australian Stories’ - people who have migrated to Oz and seen the times change; someone from a tattoo parlour in The Cross covered head to toe in ink; a blind person talking about how they experience the world; and actors and storytellers who can pull the kid’s legs with tall tales and jokes.

Simply put, everyone has a story to tell, and no-one knows how to tell your story like you do. It doesn’t have to be wild and wacky (although it certainly can be), just something from your life that you feel makes it unique.

Whilst it’s clearly not for everyone, volunteering to be a Book has the potential to be a distinctly rewarding personal experience, as well as a generous contribution to the young community. With your help, we can create a safe environment for kids to interact with a huge range of people who they normally wouldn’t cross paths with - and what better way to promote awareness and acceptance of diversity?

The time commitment isn’t huge - at least one of the Library sessions for a few hours on either the 2nd  or 9th October, as well as a short info session in the week prior - so if you think you’d like to be involved, contact me for more details.
If it doesn’t sound like your cup of tea, PLEASE forward this to anyone else you know who you think might be interested.

This is the type of event that really needs personal recommendations to work, so I appreciate any assistance you can give me with that.

Thanks, and we hope to hear from some of you soon,

Kyra Bartley
Associate Producer of Sydney Children’s Festival
producing@carriageworks.com.au | 02 8571 9099
(in the office Monday, Tuesday & Wednesday)

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