Concept: Changing Lives

​

Caerphilly Miners Centre for the Community was established to preserve the social heritage embedded in the Miners building and to breath new life into the building. One of our charity objectives is to celebrate the heritage of our building. Our vision for the Miners has been to create a 21st century resource to support the health and wellbeing of our community, equivalent to the endeavours of the Miners in the early 20th century in safeguarding their health through a hospital. So, our Board was excited at the prospect of being able to create a digital record our social heritage.

​

The Project

​

Our plan was to create a collection of short videos about Our Life with the Miners as an archive of people’s personal history, to train people to make and edit films and to recruit people willing to tell their stories. The project started in mid-December just before the winter Covid lockdown which lasted for the whole life of the project.  We were also challenged by serious illness in our project lead.  This led to fewer films being made and the launch of the webpage, online contact form and social media campaign taking place later than planned. 

​

Developing Digital Skills

​

Although we were unable to train volunteers in filmmaking, our marketing group found other ways to engage our community, develop digital skills and maintain our profile and community engagement. As well as online Zoom events, we asked our community to tell us what comes to mind when they think of the Miners, we had an excellent response with lovely comments and we have captured and share these here. We also involved 50+ community members in making a film of our outreach activities. This process itself have helped to improve the filming and film-making skills of our community and led us to engage new volunteers with digital skills, interests in filming, and confidence in speaking to camera. The people involved as well as people in classes that were part of the video were all excited by the process and it really made a difference to the emotional wellbeing of several of our members – breaking up ‘long winter months in isolation’.

​

Recruiting Storytellers

​

On 10th March 2021 we started a Facebook campaign with a post asking our community if they were born, had given birth, or worked at the Miners. To our amazement we reached 25,531 people, received 4982 engagements and 255 comments within a few days. We created another Facebook post on 12th March asking for volunteers to create short films telling the story of My Life and the Miners.  Instead, with a reach of a further 16,600 people, we received 1895 engagements and 47 comments about their fond memories of experiences at the Miners. We boosted this post for 4 days from 12th -16th March and we promoted our page for the rest of the month, which reached a further 8,313 people with 797 engagements.