Doune the Rabbit Hole CIC is a very, very small company with some great ideas and plans.
Our overall mission is to make Scotland HAPPIER!
The plan to do this is simple and complicated all at once:
Doune the Rabbit Hole will make sure there is no financial boundary to children learning creative skills. By “creative skills” I mean skills like playing instruments, sculpting, writing poetry, animation and anything else you can think of that might be termed “art”. We’ve noticed that there’s a bit of disparity between wealthy folks – whose kids get to go off and learn how to do all these wonderful, creative and fun things through private tuition – and people who are less well off who’s parents might not be able to afford for their children to be privately educated in all these activities.
You might say: But schools teach art and music, why would they need extra education in these areas outside of school?
We could answer this with another question: How much of school did you really enjoy? Usually the answer is “Not much” and sadly that is still the case today. Children don’t associate their school (or anything in it) with fun and happiness. Everything that occurs in school is labelled dull, boring and uninteresting – which art is not! The classroom environment just isn’t ideal for teaching children creative skills. The Curriculum for Excellence is all well and good and it certainly encourages music and art tuition in schools but it doesn’t seem to work as well as hoped. Kids react much better to a creative education if it occurs outside of the classroom.
We’re not just making this up! See this Scottish Government Report on the matter http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2010/12/14144908/0 .
So, what we propose to do is to provide free creative arts education outside school for kids who can’t afford to be privately educated. Another thing it says on the above report is that the more kids are involved in creative and cultural activities (like going to gigs, poetry readings, gallery openings, reading literature etc) the more likely they are to be interested in that kind of thing when they grow up.
How will you do this?
We plan to put on affordable, interesting and family friendly events which are free for under 12s to attend so that they can get involved in the arts and culture from an early age. Importantly, this does not mean the events are for kids – that would be defeating the point – they are for adults but are child-friendly so that children who attend them feel like adults but are not alienated. Through these events we hope to raise enough money to go towards teaching children creative skills for free.
Why do you see creativity as so important anyway?
Being creative makes people happy and we think happiness is a good thing! There are literally hundreds of psychological and scientific papers relating creativity to happiness – here is one to be getting on with: Creativity and Happiness.
Thanks for reading and enjoy our events! Especially our festival, of course!
