Multidisciplinary Group

Josephine Cutts talks about the 'Multidisciplinary group' at Edwalton, Gamston and District U3A which enables members from different groups to provide content to one theme.

Edwalton, Gamston and District U3A's Multi-Disciplinary Group began as our Painting Group all respond to one theme and I thought we could expand this to allow responses in different mediums from members of other groups.

As it happened, the topic of that month was Trees which lent itself to all kinds of ideas.

The idea was put forward in the monthly newsletter. It was quite a slow start as I didn't initially put in an end date. After a second call for submissions, contributions came in from the photography group, the writing group, the Shakespeare reading group and of course the painting group, as well as individuals not representing any group.

I collated the submissions into a physical folder which our newsletter editor then turned into a Powerpoint presentation.  This was circulated to all our members, along with an invitation to submit items for the next topic, Gardens.

The PowerPoint was very well received and almost immediately people started sending me contributions. I have had very interesting items from the history group and the family history group, The scrabble group, the wine group and craft group have also sent me items (none of these groups have participated before.) I have also had things from all the groups who joined in with the first project, so as this project doesn't finish until the end of this month I expect it will be even bigger, and perhaps better, than the first one, certainly it will be different.

I intend to carry on with this Multidisciplinary idea as long as is needed, probably as long as lockdown continues. The next topic will be Water.