6.1 Archive "Weekends" and ATA Events
The project budget for travel, food and accommodation for Archive "Weekends" was based on an optimistic estimate of 8 non-project team participants in each event. This in turn was based on a high point over several years of 6 participants in pre-project Wennington and Caldecott Community "Weekends". This was not an average, but a maximum. In the event, during the first two Archive "Weekends" of the project both Wennington and Bodenham Manor engaged 17 former children and staff participants each, followed by the first Caldecott "Weekend" which involved 11 former children and staff and an additional 4 volunteers for a total of 15. That these high totals did not hold for the whole of the project is indicated by the final participant average of 13 persons per "Weekend"; but that average did translate into 60 more people taking part than were predicted and provided for in the original Archive "Weekend" budget.
Another expectation, based on the practice in pre-project Archive "Weekends" (and in a number of therapeutic environments in the past), was that the Community members themselves would prepare their own food and take care of all of the arrangements in the kitchen: They would be self-catered, and this was reflected in the Archive "Weekend" budget. What was discovered was that the high number of participants, and especially - by definition - the high number of participants who had not been to an Archive "Weekend" before, made full self-catering largely impractical and even counter-productive: So much was being asked of participants already in the course of a brief 2 1/2 days that to ensure that mealtimes and making provision for food and cooking did not completely dominate the limited time available, it became necessary, simply for practical purposes, to provide catering through the normal P.E.T.T. catering team. The positive knock-on effect was a fuller participation by members of the P.E.T.T. team in the project, through the mealtimes and all the arrangements and relationships involved in creating them; and in the positive sense of being well cared-for, which resonated with positive consequences throughout the Archive "Weekends". Although a pragmatic adjustment of the project design, it became an essential and positive feature of it.
Assessment, Training and Advisory Events had catering factored into the budget from the outset, along with travel. Although not on the scale of the Archive "Weekend", the average of 12.5 participants per session as opposed to the projected 10 resulted in 20 more participants overall than were budgeted for.