—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

Functionsuite-Artlink, Royal Edinburgh Hospital | September 06

Skills Bank is a project that developed from a three month residency at Functionsuite in the Royal Edinburgh Hospital.
The idea was to introduce a way for patients, out patients, volunteers and staff at the hospital to have the opportunity to share skills and learn from one another on a regular basis without money being part of the equation. This is already happens within the hospital on many levels, through involvement in horticulture, art and music workshops where patients have the opportunity to learn new skills. This project has a particular emphasis on finding out and showing the variety of knowledge and ability of individuals within the hospital and the desire they have to develop what constitutes as a ‘skill.’ How individuals might be able to make even the smallest thing into a transferable learning experience for someone else. The opportunity to show/teach another person what we do well is an important and positive experience, which is often disregarded and should be encouraged. We all have things we do well, academic or practical skills. The initial research was to look at similar existing projects and see how they operated. One such project is the LETS scheme, LETS stands for Local Exchange Trading System and is an alternative means of exchanging goods and services without the need for money.

—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————