A week in the life of…Emily

Hello!
I am Emily one of the Recovery College Coordinators. No two days are the same in the life of a co-ordinator!
Between Rachel and me we manage the co-ordinating of the college and its courses.
Its my job to ensure we plan to have an interesting range of topics, across the district, in the morning and afternoon, run by either staff, volunteers or partners to meet the demand and reflect the community. As a whole piece of work, we tend to review this every six months.
Part of my job is to find or stumble across the amazing people that have the skills and experience to develop a course or workshop for us. I will spend time getting to know our staff, volunteers and partners and take them through the journey of building a recovery college course or workshop from an idea to it going ahead on the day. This is a step-by-step process that involves meetings, paperwork, sometimes training, marketing, feedback from our editorial panel to ensure co-production, co-ordinating system set up and evaluation form analysis.
Coordinating also involves a lot of logistics when it comes to dates, venue booking and equipment. Because we are not permanently based from one location its my job to work out what community venue would be appropriate, and book based on the availability of the tutors and availability of the venues.
I also need to manage the equipment for each course getting from A to B work out who will pick it up, take it to the venue and when they will drop it back to base an ensure that its prepped and ready to go.
This is all a bit of a juggling act – Rachel and I co-ordinate around 90 courses/workshops per term! Spreadsheets are our friends!
I also manage the venues we run our sessions from across the district to ensure the space has been risk assessed, is safe, accessible, and suitable to run our groups from. I have spent a bit of time recently ironing out the information we have on each of our venues and the internal process in which we use to book with each of our venues.
I lead our weekly team meeting we have on a Wednesday morning whereby we have a round of what I call ‘highs and lows’, we can each can share with the team what’s going great for us and what isn’t so much at the moment. We also discuss any points we would like to bring to the team and make the decision on together. I am about to start delivering one of these team meetings every month as a learning session where we share knowledge and learning between us on all manner of different topics from wellbeing to practical work or life skills.
I keep my hand in the Individual learning plans (ILPs) with the new students that enrol with the college which enables me to hear firsthand from the students when that are first interacting with us.
I have been spending a bit of time recently focusing on the promotion of the college and how best to promote both the college and the courses we run. This is a project that has enabled us to get our heads together as a team and have a good think about who is going to reach out to who to promote the amazing work we do!
I hope this helps paint a bit of a picture about my role at the college and the life of a Recovery College Coordinator.