Featured Volunteer!

Alex Green, Volunteer Coordinator, spoke to Eleanor James who has been named our November Featured Volunteer….

Eleanor joins me via zoom in her chilly bedroom on this December morning. It’s amazing that we found the time to meet, given Eleanor’s busy schedule. When Eleanor isn’t volunteering for The Bank Of Dreams And Nightmares you will find her juggling several other hats! She is an assistant coach for Jurassic Gymnastics, she does admin for The Romantic Novelists Association making sure all the courses run smoothly and she also has a degree in Writing for Broadcasting, Media and Performance (AKA Scriptwriting). In her downtime she likes gaming and music, she has played the piano since she was 6 years old “As I’ve done it so long, it’s just me, it’s what I’m used to”. Eleanor loves musicals and has just got back from seeing the new Disney musical “Newsies” in London. 

Eleanor tells me how she heard about TBODAN and knew it was something she wanted to be involved in “A family friend told me about it and I went and had a look and here we are! What I love most is to help children and be able to facilitate them being creative”. 

We all know the difference that can be made by one person believing in us. Eleanor reflected on how that one influential person who listened to her in school made a huge difference to the path she took “I was lucky to have a teacher, my English teacher in secondary school, who was one of those teachers who was like that. Not all the teachers can do that….we (TBODAN) actually do and the children get to see what their work has done and it doesn’t just get filed away somewhere”

Eleanor wanted to give children the same encouragement with their creativity which she was given in school.

“ I feel really lucky to have been able to be part of it and pay it forward. My English teacher saw me grow up and had me in her class all but one of my years at school and everything she did for me and for my class and my friends helped us so much. Then to be able to pay that forward to so many students especially when they’ve been so affected by covid and not done as much creative writing as they might have done, I felt honoured to be able to help them and facilitate it. Had it not been for that teacher, 100%, I would have gone down a different path and had a different career” 

Eleanor has volunteered for three of our longer secondary school projects with Beaminster, Colfox and Budmouth schools and says her favourite part is “Building the connection between us and the students and, more importantly, seeing them being really, really proud of what they can do and finding value in what they’ve done”

During our 6-10 weeks projects, the students have created their own short stories which all come together in a beautifully bound anthology. Budmouth are currently working on their own ‘Guide To Weymouth’ which will be completed later this month. 

“Seeing some of the students who haven’t necessarily spoken to each other before, who aren’t in the same social circles and then they are all put in this together. You look at them and they appear to be mismatched but actually they're so similar they end up getting on. Without this they probably would have never spoken to each other but now it’s a very small group of them that are part of this and no one can take that away from them and that’s special to them”

So what are Eleanor’s plans for her own writing career? “Well, now that I’ve got more time to do some actual writing….a while ago a friend made a comment she was sick of the Disney tropes and we decided to switch it on its head and have a prince character who was completely useless”. And will it be a musical? “I’ve a couple of friends who are songwriters and concept writers so I can ask them” 

That sounds amazing, we can’t wait to see it! 

And my final question for Eleanor…If it was your last day on Earth and you could go anywhere and have one superpower what would it be and where would you go? 

”Because I’ve just come back from Newsies, I’m still riding that theatre adrenaline high so, very specifically, I’d go back to that theatre, The Wembley Troubadour, and have that experience again…..For the super power, this is something I’ve had a similar answer to growing up, it would be just something that would be able to help someone could go without pain for a day or do something they wouldn’t normally able to do. I’ve grown up in a household with family who have various physical disabilities and I can see how hard it is for them sometimes, even for a day if they could do things the rest of us do without even thinking about it” 

What an incredible superpower that would be…..

Thank you so much, Eleanor, for joining me today and for all your hard work, we feel very lucky to have you on the TBODAN team!