The aim was to bring together the gypsy/traveller communities and arts/craft people to enhance the development and sustainability of new businesses through a combination of virtual business solutions and community tourist/craft ventures. This involved a wide range of local and one national bodies.
The focus was to engage with gypsy/traveller communities and enable them to attend sessions and work with artists as well as engage in other activities (e.g. improving English and Maths, attend conferences etc). Another strand of actvity was to use the project to raise awareness of the issues gypsy and traveller communities face in oder to encourge and extend future cross-partnership working.
There was remarkable change in the in the behaviour of learners, such as improvement in female attendance and latter male attendance, especially at literacy and numeracy sessions. Staff had to learn how to be less formal and more responsive which is really supporting individual learner needs. Barriers to leanrign were identified and reduced to enable the progresion of men into literacy and numeracy provision and into family learning programmes. After the project conlcuded there was further evidence of progression onto mainstream programmes. Funding to ciontune the work was found to ensure continuation of the work beyond the life of the project and partner organsations all made changes to how they worked to enable future and further development of this kind. Data was gathered through observation of practice and document analysis.