Creativity

SkillWise endeavours to nurture the creative potential of people we support in a number of different ways including artistic endeavours through the White Room, performance with Many Hats Theatre Company and participation in the Plains FM Radio Show to name but a few!

Art sessions take place in The White Room at our SkillWise premises and at other creative spaces across the community. We support people who want to use visual art as a vehicle to communicate their thoughts, dreams, views and aspirations with others. This includes exhibitions and the possibility of artists starting a microenterprise. Find out more at The White Room website here.

The White Room also facilitate an outreach program that uses multiple different art forms and styles to connect artists with the wider community. Keep up to date with The White Room Outreach Program here.

Many Hats Theatre Company teaches performance techniques in poetry, puppetry, drama, improvisation and verbatim theatre. We rehearse and perform with director Paul McCaffrey as well as other professional actors, musicians and theatre technicians. We have staged a production at The Court Theatre and in our own theatre space, we have also collaborated with St Andrews College and released our own feature length film. Find out more about Many Hats and current shows at their website here.

SkillWise on Air

SkillWise hosts a magazine-style radio show on Plains FM, called ‘SkillWise on Air’. We choose what we would like to include in each show, then plan, rehearse, and record at Plains FM. The show airs on the last Thursday of every month at 12pm on Plains FM 96.9. This is a fun way to get involved in the community and have a chance to be creative, share knowledge, stories and experiences.

Model Railway Club

Modelling railways is a hobby that encompasses a wide range of skills, from woodworking, low voltage electronics, research and planning, to scenery and buildings as well as the trains. Modellers at SkillWise are involved mainly with building an HO scale American based model railroad using the Free-Mo modular standard. What this means is we can set up our layout in different ways and have other modellers who build to the same system connect with our layout or vice versa. We have exhibited since 2008 in shows from Christchurch to Invercargill.

We also have modellers interested in cars, planes and ships who build their models with us or in their own time.