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Avec Archives: Annotated Catalogue
George Lovell and Catherine Widdicombe
(An Avec Publication, Autumn 2000)
75pp
£2.00
This catalogue classifies, lists and describes the archives, which have accrued from the extensive action, research, training and consultancy programmes outlined in the introduction to this brochure. It therefore helps to make them accessible to anyone who wishes to see, study or research the data covering the period 1966- 1994, with some papers from 1995-2000.
The main sections are:
- Community-development
- The Methodist Church in Britain and community development, 1964-1980
- Parchmore Methodist Church Youth and Community Centre Project (one of the Ten-Centres Scheme) 1966-1972
- Project 70-75 (an ecumenical action-research project to test the applicability of church and community development approaches) 1970-1976
- Avec, an ecumenical agency for church and community development (1976-1994)
- Subsequent work.
The Avec section is the most extensive and includes papers related to:
- the far reaching discussions about how the agency could achieve its purposes and the problems it faced
- courses, including those for missionaries work consultancy with individuals, projects, and group consultancies.
All this was treated as action research and fully recorded and evaluated by the participants themselves, the staff and trustees, and through an independent research programme.
The collection of Avec papers is unique and extraordinarily valuable. Some are in open files, others embargoed until 2020. It contains, for instance, a vast number of position and briefing papers about work situations and projects by those involved in them. These papers profile situations, describe the practitioners’ beliefs and approaches, the opportunities and difficulties they faced and the help they needed. Some notes of the analytical and consultative discussions which led to designing work programmes are also included and, in some cases, reports. The intrinsic value and reliability of this material is high: it was presented to get help and was thoroughly examined by groups of practitioners and work consultants — some notes of which are available.