Wednesday, 2 October 2013

Week 1// Day 2// First Client Meeting at the Town Hall

And...we're off!

Today marked the official start to LGBT Sheffield LIVE.  Our team set of this morning to the Town Hall where we met our client, the Labour councillor of Walkley, Neale Gibson.  We were given an overview of his expectations of the project which helped us to establish how we would be situated within it.  It was a fantastic opportunity to open up a discussion about the myriad of LGBT issues both local and universal that exist.  We highlighted current established LGBT services, leisure and community groups within the city but agreed that there was a lack permanent LGBT community space.  Precedent examples of cities such as Manchester and Leeds were shown to have established permanent LGBT spaces within their respective centres which led us to the question of, how can we provide a similar space for the LGBT community in Sheffield?

Back in the Arts Tower HQ we had an internal group meeting to discuss the task ahead.  We are currently in the research phase of our project, looking into the history of the LGBT, local stakeholders and existing precedents of gay spaces taken from around the world.  We are very excited to be working with Neale Gibson and LGBT Sheffield and hopefully within these next 6 weeks we will make a valuable contribution to this worthy cause and project.

From left to right: Simon Chadwick (Tutor) Niamh Lincoln, Gopi Bhuptani, Armand Agraviador, Vakandis Kallis, Katherine Wong, Yu-Hsiang Lai, Neale Gibson (Labour Councillor), Elin Friberg, Kelly-Marie Rodgers, Richard Fennell, Yuting Dai, Yibo Yang,Yaying Feng.