Skill Share Dundee

Skill Share Dundee is a group helping to inspire and empower students and members of the residential community by sharing skills and crafts.

Skill Share Dundee's aims are to bring generations together and maintain skills and crafts that might be lost.

Over the past few years I have seen the loss of practical life skills within the student community, currently universities prepare students academically but miss out on practical life skills which students require in later life, skill share dundee hopes to provide these in fun and informative ways.

Skill Share Dundee has now been running for two years now and is going from strength to strength by learning lessons from last years classes.

The initial concept came to me while I was volunteering in tayside recycler's fixing bicycles, i've always loved building things and when people came up to me asking about how to repair bicycles, I thought maybe I could share my other skills too.

I put the idea to Jonathan Baxter and he shared that he too had a similar vision so off we set to create skill share dundee in the rather dimly lit cavern that was the bicycle area of tayside recyclers.

Allot of skill share dundee's principles are bases on the likes of Tinkering School: Think, Make, Tinker!

and also Men's Sheds - MensShed Australia AMSA.

Bicycle building/maintenance

Gardening

Wood work (Cold frame building)

Planting seedlings

leather work(15th century flacket bottle)

Wine making

Electronics(tag tool)

Wood work

Rocket Stove construction

So what have we learned from last semester:

-less technical classes are easier for people to engage with and hold their concentration

-we need to teach less and give one of the greatest gift to empower people to understand what skills and strengths they already have and let them share them.

-We hope to use a questionnaire like the one below to enable people to easier answer the question "what skills do you have?"

-The greatest gift is allowing others to give so rather than just teaching all the classes, we will try to open the space up for more participants to share.

---This Semesters classes on offer this semester are loosely based around vintage skills---

This is just a rough breakdown of possible classes that will be run.

-Vintage photography-taking photos using vintage cameras and also guide through development process- leave with a nice negative as a keepsake

-Vintage bicycle maintenance and also how to make one of a kind bike baskets

-Leather work- one of a kind leather objects-belts, bags and other objects

-Upholstery of furniture

-Welding projects

-building bicycle trailers

-wilderness walks

-wine making courses and tasting sessions

-Tinkering events- think Macgyver, you will learn how to solve problems and repair your own objects by good old tinkering and putting your knowledge into practice.

-Bring your broken items events- where you will learn how to repair everyday objects

--Plans for the future--

-to bring more young people and bring skill share to schools

-to integrate more elderly people into skill share