Thanks to £56K funding from National Lottery Heritage Fund, WonderZoo will be archiving 20+ years of the Plymouth Respect Festival.

 

This well-known festival was founded by Ann Wilkinson and her friend Dan Thompson in 1998 and has been going ever since, with support from the Plymouth and Devon Racial Equality Council (PDREC) and other organisations. The history project will be called Celebrate Respect. 

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The project aims are to research the development of the festival from its inception to present day. By interviewing organisers, participants and audiences of the festival, the team at WonderZoo will map out its history and impact. They will create an archive of 100 oral history recordings, transcriptions, photographs, film footage, and other artefacts, to be stored at The Box Museum and Art Gallery, to be kept for posterity.

 

The archive will ensure that all the hard work, ambition and passion involved in creating the Respect Festival will never be forgotten, so that people will always know about the diversity and unity of individuals and organisations in Plymouth who have taken part in it.

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We have just started on the project and will be creating social media pages and a website to follow by end of February.  It's very exciting to get started on this fab project.