RAY Ceredigion are a charity that make a huge difference to children and families across the county.
Based in the seaside town of Aberaeron, RAY Ceredigion provide a wide variety of support, including playschemes, creches, activities, parent and toddler sessions and intergenerational community projects. Their most recent venture, mostly undertaken during lockdown, was the RAY Play Project.
The year length project was part of a West Wales is Kind programme. Supported by the Welsh Government as part of A Healthier West Wales the aim was to support regional intergenerational projects that improve social connectedness, support young and old to learn from one another and maximise the potential of digital technologies.
Open to everyone regardless of age or background, the RAY Play project used the theme of play as a facilitator to spark intergenerational conversations. The focus was to discover how children play today, how adults played as children and what has remained the same throughout the generations e.g. hide and seek, den building. The ethos behind the project was that play reminds people of happy and joyful times and everyone can relate to playing at some point in their lives. So, it’s a very effective subject for bringing generations to share their experiences, which has been even more important over the last year.
RAY Ceredigion had great plans to organise group workshops and catch-ups over coffee, but 2020 had different ideas. So, they had to get creative and adapt to a digital delivery to ensure they continued to reach out to children and families. A RAY Play Project Facebook group was set up as a place to share memories of play, photos, artwork and visual records of play now and in the past. And the team rolled out a 2-part interactive online questionnaire, designed to enable children to interview their parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles etc. and then for the older generation to interview their young relatives using the children’s questionnaire.
Steph Glover, RAY Play Project Coordinator explains,
“The response to the questionnaire has been great! Older generations had the opportunity to relive play memories and the younger generations got to talk about what matters to them in the world of play.”
Gill Byrne, Executive Officer, RAY Ceredigion adds,
“As predicted, we found that talking about play makes people happy and feeling happy is really important at this period of uncertainty for all generations. Children and young people have found it fascinating, realising (perhaps for the first time) that their parents and grandparents were children once too, and parents and grandparents have found themselves ‘fessing up to some less than angelic behaviour!”
The testimonials from people who took part speak for themselves, with one Ceredigion resident commenting:
“When filling out the RAY Play Questionnaire with my dad, he recalled that during weekends he would invite up to 12 of his friends over, and to feed them his mum would cook up this enormous pot of stew.
This is something he had completely forgotten, and it has prompted him to try and recreate it several times during lockdown. After food, him and his mates would head out to play and spend their time building rope swings over the river, making dens in the woods, building go-carts and playing cowboys and Indians. They would spend hours searching for old wheels, rope or wire, bonnets off old cars and other things they could use.
The other thing my dad recalled is the time his father spent with him helping with his DIY skills and this has prompted him to spend more time with my 12-year-old son, his grandson on shared projects, passing on the skills he practiced with his friends over 50 years ago. As a family the questionnaires have brought us closer together.”
With the help of local community artist, Pod Clare, all the research findings including artwork, photos, interviews, memories and experiences have contributed to the design and making of a wonderful outdoor mosaic. The artwork will be on display outside RAY Ceredigion’s building on Tabernacle Street in Aberaeron.
A special newspaper will also be created to celebrate everyone that has taken part in the RAY Play Project. The publication will highlight some of the great experiences and memories shared and feature some fun activities to encourage further play together.
All information on the RAY Play Project including links to take part in the RAY Play Questionnaire can be found on the RAY Ceredigion website. Find out more about the various community projects, events and activities they offer on the RAY Ceredigion Facebook page.
