For #iWill Week, Reading Hacker Mikey shares how he volunteered to organise and run a Star Wars event in his local library.

“We applied to the Reading Hack Project Fund in order to run a Star Wars Reads event in Penkridge Library. We organised activities to run from Monday 16th October to Saturday 28th October, with a craft event run by myself and another Reading Hacker on Saturday 21st October. During the fortnight, young library users could join in a Star Wars colouring competition, do activity sheets and take part in a treasure hunt to win prizes, as well as borrow Star Wars books for all ages. Our final event was on Saturday 4th November, when we presented the prizes to all our winners.

We used the money from the project fund to buy arts and crafts materials, then ran activities to make Yoda stick puppets, personal lightsabers, and lightsaber bookmarks. Everyone who attended received a certificate and activity pack, which we downloaded for free. In addition, everyone who took part in the colouring competition received a lollipop for taking part and had their entries displayed in a special area within the library. Everyone who took part in the treasure hunt received a sweet for taking part and then all their entries went into a prize draw.

On 4th November we held a prize giving ceremony. This was a really lovely event as parents, siblings and even some grandparents of our prize winners attended. It was almost like the Oscars! After all the prizes had been presented, one parent said how pleased they were that this event had gone ahead, and how much their children had enjoyed it and loved coming to the library in general.

We had 21 entries for the treasure hunt, 23 colouring competition entries, 10 people attended the event on 21st October and we loaned 21 Star Wars books.

For me, it was a great learning experience to create the budget for prizes and for materials required. I then to collaborate with the staff, discussing the date of the event, suitable crafts, prizes, competitions and displays. I have come to appreciate just how much time and effort an event such as this takes. I had never realised before just how long it takes to cut out numerous pieces of felt and foam, and deciding the winners of the colouring competition was one of the hardest things I have ever done!

We are really grateful to the Reading Agency to have received this funding to enable us to put on this event. Thank you so much!"

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