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The Bilinyo Cultural Centre is conceived as a comprehensive response to all the needs Cooperative Growth - Uganda has for the development of its projects. For many years, our NGO had no office whatsoever to bring people in, no owned spaces to carry out activities, we were lacking a place we could call home.
The first project ever carried out by Cooperative Growth - Uganda was our Vura Music Project. The most basic explanation of the project could be this one: A mixed music school developed as an extracurricular activity for children starting from P4 and above. Music school equals a lot of noise, music sounding here and there, sometimes in the shape of a nice marching song, but very often as a repetitive exercise only interesting to the boy or girl practicing it. For years, we worked within the premisses of other organizations, sharing the spaces and very often generating complaints by other users. Always reasonable complaints and always motivated by situations necessary to us. It was obvious the necessity of counting on a place for our exclusive use, with our own rules and under our single responsibility. That is how the idea of the Bilinyo Cultural Centre was born.
It was initially imagined as a place to host music activities together with other arts, such as literature or painting. With that idea in mind, we received funds to build an Arts School, the firs facility withing the Bilinyo Cultural Centre. This building has a total of six rooms or halls divided into two wings, one for the participants, one for administration. There is a third wing for toilets.
In the main wing will find four halls of different sizes, designed to host individual or small group lessons as well as large music group lessons. This setting makes the building very versatile and ready to accommodate the new activities as they are organised.
For the administrative wing, we have the office and the library, areas with limited access to guaranty the safety of all the materials. It is a single room office, with no partitions, to facilitate the team work. NGO management and project coordinators seat together and freely share ideas and concerns. With time, to our music project, a new section was added, the Manuela Project for children with special needs, and it pushed us to completely re-design the Bilinyo Cultural Centre.
The new scenario needed a new approach. The original setting was comprehending only two buildings: The Arts School and the Exhibition Centre. Now, more space was required to add a third and very vital building: The Centre for Children with Special Needs.
This new building is specifically designed to host the different activities commonly carried out in such a centre. Following the drawings above, the future building will count on two therapy rooms/classrooms, one adapted bathroom and big gym. This construction is extremely urgent, given the project is operating since 2021 and the space we have for therapy is what we designed for music and other arts. Our library, as shown in the photo, is currently the therapy room, and the rest of the halls are shared by the music trainings and the skills training for children with special needs. The flexible design chosen for the Arts School is proven fantastic, because we really managed to host our activities under acceptable conditions. Yet, Manuela Project needs to grow to reach a bigger number of needy children and families.
Fortunatelly for us, the construction process already started and by mid 2023 will be completed.
Besides this, recently our NGO was awarded with new funds and before the end of the year 2023, the Exhibition Centre will also be a reality. We will be one step closer to fulfilling our biggest dream, we will be closer to completing the Bilinyo Cultural Centre. For this to become true, we need to add a guesthouse for volunteers and staff and a small house for the security guards.
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