Month: September 2015

Week 2 at The Long Well Walk

This week has felt like a crash course in ‘How To Be A Teacher’.

It’s been a week spent scouring the internet for tips, guides, lesson plans, activity ideas and any information that I can find on how to keep 7-16 year olds engaged and entertained while educating them on some really quite sensitive subjects. You would think this would be easy, given that I’ve been to school myself, I should remember this stuff, right? Wrong. How on earth do you keep a child busy for a whole hour?! And then do that 4 or 5 times in one day….

 

Somehow though, I’ve managed to come up with activities, lesson plans, games and exercises ready to flesh out into the programmes. Although this has meant many an hour sat pouring over the web, in front of a screen, snacking on pistachio nuts and looking longingly out the window at the sunny weather, I have also had a weird amount of fun allowing my creative side out: playing on BBC bitesize and trying out the maths puzzles about water buckets.

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The idea is that the activities will educate the children on the important issues associated with The Long Well Walk, while also incorporating the National Curriculum and therefore making our programme as appealing as possible to teachers. In addition to this, we have to ensure that the materials packs we will be providing for them to teach the lesson with cover absolutely everything they could need: Learning objectives, success criteria, time scales, differentiated tasks, extension tasks, alternative tasks…. Yeah, it’s been a long week. However to make sure that we get schools on board, we have to convince the teachers that the Outreach Programme isn’t just going to be a heap of more work for them.

 

Already, the scheme seems to be falling into place. At the end of this week we now have clear programme options to be offered to schools: one day, one week or full year options, as well as lesson ‘water drops’ – lesson starters which are to be used throughout the year alongside normal lessons as snippets of information and reminders of The Long Well Walk to the students. Of course, we also have a million and one fundraising ideas for the schools to carry out as at the end of the day, projects can’t go forwards without spending pennies – next week will be spent stringing it all together and actually getting some structure!

 

 

Week 1 at The Long Well Walk

The first week of my internship at The Long Well Walk is officially finished and so far the programme has been everything I wanted it to be and more….

 

The charity I’m working with, The Long Well Walk, is one which funds and supports water projects in sub-Saharan Africa, aiming to raise awareness of the water poverty there and improve living conditions for as many people as possible. It’s truly an amazing charity, created by one man, Liam Garcia who had this vision to fight water poverty and decided to raise the money to do so by literally doing a Long (very long) Well Walk. This meant walking from Sheffield, his home town, to Cape Town, South Africa. Yeah. Crazy stuff.

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So far, Liam has walked the European leg of his journey and sets off again this October to complete the African leg, aiming to stop by all of his projects, old and new, along the way. Since creating this one (slightly ridiculous) idea, the charity has blossomed, and Liam now has a team working away in Sheffield. One thing I love about The Long Well Walk is it’s transparency – the creation of his own, small charity rather than being sponsored to support an existing one meant that Liam can control exactly where the money goes and trust that there’s no middle man, every penny raised helps to give someone, somewhere a better life. Before even finishing the walk, he’s set up and completed multiple projects, digging boreholes and installing latrine systems for partner communities in Africa… Do I need to explain why I wanted to work with this charity?

 

The overall aim of my 4 week placement is to design and produce an outreach programme which will be taken into schools and colleges in the UK in September with the goal of increasing the awareness of water and sanitation issues in some parts of sub-Saharan Africa, educating students and staff of the potential solutions and the long term aim of generating fundraising to support even more projects through relationships developed with each school.

 

This week, my role has been to create the skeleton of the programme, developing a clearer structure for us to work with through meetings with both primary and secondary school teachers. As a quick breakdown:

  • Monday was spent familiarising myself with the charity and its work and the strategies behind how it plans projects and collaborates with the partner organisations in Africa. This gave me the understanding of how the charity will benefit the most from the programme.
  • Tuesday was spent researching and beginning to develop ideas for possible activities, fundraising techniques and possible different programme options that could be offered to the schools.
  • Wednesday and Thursday consisted of looooooong days of meetings with primary and secondary school teachers to gain an insight into what could be feasible, realistic and provide the maximum benefit to both the students and the charity. These days proved to be incredibly useful in sharing and fleshing out ideas and creating a solid backbone to the programme.
  • Friday was spent writing up the notes from the previous days and consolidating the ideas. By the end of this week we have clear programme options and task lists for next week where the ball will roll full steam ahead in research and filling out the details on activities, resources and logistics. logo

Charity Insights Visits #2

The Charity Insights tour bus was back on the road once again, with a couple more students to be visited on location. Unfortunately, this bus is entirely metaphorical, so means of less imagined transport included the very literal London underground and South West Trains.

On one of the rainiest days of the year, myself and Jess set out to visit Chris at Sense about Science, a charity attempting to equip people to make sense of scientific and medical claims in the press and public discussion. Working with over 6,000 scientists, they run campaigns such as Ask for Evidence and host panels on subjects such as plant science and energy. Chris had been doing a lot of work around the latter energy panel, as well as sharpening his social media acumen dealing with the charity’s Twitter account. When we met at their north London office, Chris’ supervisor, Chris Peters, had only positive things to say, noting that ‘we’d do well to have more volunteers of [Chris’] calibre’. High praise indeed! We also got to take away a couple of Sense about Sciences Making Sense Of… publications as a parting gift.

Reading the 'Making Sense of Allergies' booklet back at my desk
Reading the ‘Making Sense of Allergies’ booklet back at my desk

I then had the chance to visit Mollie in the great outdoors at Bedfont Lakes Country Park. In addition to the nature reserve, the visitor centre is home to a whole host of animals, including a barn owl, some raccoon dogs, and a jumpy little critter called Toto, a genet.

Mollie with Toto the genet - who was too quick for the camera!
Mollie with Toto the genet – who was too quick for the camera!

The project presented Mollie with a great opportunity to work with a whole host of different animals and learn more about the diversity within the several acres of the reserve. It wasn’t all about learning, however, as Mollie also ran sessions with young visitors to the park, including showing off spiders and exploring nature trails. Again, feedback from both staff and Mollie was overwhelmingly positive – and I got see my first ever genet!

One of the titular lakes of Bedfont Lakes Country Park
One of the titular lakes of Bedfont Lakes Country Park

As the final Charity Insights projects are coming to a close, I’d like to thank all the host organisations for providing great opportunities for all of this year’s participants to really get involved and contribute during their 4 weeks, and of course a big hand to all the students for blogging over the summer!

Week Three at WildHearts

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A big part of this week was consolidating attendance at the Edinburgh GEL summit. The invitations that I distributed last week resulted in a great number of responses and new signups for the event. Although the initial period after sending my invitations was fairly quiet, in the end the effort did pay off.

With the Edinburgh GEL fast approaching the volume of emails coming in is increasing and there are always event bookings to be taken and parking/dinner reservations to be made. This has highlighted the importance of multi-tasking, as I have been required to deal with these requests in parallel with my other set tasks.

I was also required to contact a number of schools from around Scotland that are attending the event in order to obtain the names of the attending school representatives. This proved less straightforward than anticipated due to the different school term start dates for each local authority. By the end of the week I had managed to collect in about half of the required information with the rest due to be obtained in week four.

Another task for this week was to liaise with the event speakers for the Edinburgh and the London GELs in order to obtain their presentation slides and handle any of their other requirements. The slides were needed in order to prepare a composite presentation for the event day and have time to test the master presentation with the venue facilities. This again was a task that will run onto week four but there was some good progress made this week.

On a slightly different note, this week I was given a couple of new research based tasks. Firstly I have been looking into various student membership organisations, focusing on their on campus activities and the number of students they can reach, in order to find new ways of promoting next year’s Micro Tyco Student Challenge. The second research task is to look into the brand ambassador schemes of various organisations in order to provide some insight on how these schemes are run. This is in support of WildHearts’ plans to launch an ambassador scheme in the future to allow industry experts to contribute their network and image towards the WildHearts cause.

So that’s that for this week, I am looking forward to completing my tasks next week so stay tuned for updates!

Don’t be afraid to ask the right questions to get the right answers.

Week 1- Internship in HIV Prevention and Surveillance (Positive Voices Project) at PHE

Following the success of my research proposal and application, I was awarded a Charity Insights Scholarship to undertake an exciting internship in the HIV/STI Department at PHE. I worked on a project called Positive Voices: National Survey of People Living with HIV (PLHIV). The aim of this cross-sectional study is to assess the behaviours, treatment patterns and healthcare needs of PLHIV. Therefore, in this unique project, people living with HIV are not only patients but also key actors which contribute to improving HIV prevention programmes, treatment and care services at the national level.

Last year, Positive Voices survey team conducted a successful pilot study that enrolled approximately 1000 patients and contained over 100 data items, including a number of sociodemographic questions which have never been collected as part of a national surveillance programme before, such as educational attainment, employment status, and poverty measures.

In the pilot survey, some ONS SEC questions were not included because they were considered intrusive or inappropriate during assessment with patients and stakeholders.  People who live with HIV may experience many challenges, but how do you find out about their experiences without asking the right questions! So, my objectives are to design and implement an alternative way to measure the SES of survey participants which can be used as an explanatory variable for analysis of risk behaviours and clinical outcomes.

I am excited about this internship because this research project closely aligns with my interests and future directions. It is a great opportunity to use my past research experiences as well as the technical skills that I have acquired during my undergraduate and PhD studies.

Highlights of my first week at PHE have been to meet the survey team, to chat with members of the HIV/STI Department and to learn more about the survey and the work that PHE do to improve the life of people living with HIV. Moreover, while doing intensive literature searches, I came across very interesting papers explaining how to develop SES constructs using scoring systems, principal component analysis and cluster analysis which will be extremely valuable for the next stage of my project.

Reflecting back to this first week, I feel very lucky to have been selected for the Charity Insights Scheme and to have the opportunity to work on the Positive Voices project. It gives me a chance to see another aspect of HIV prevention research and its application in practices. Working with a team of committed individuals really gets me excited to perform well, so I am enthusiastically looking forward the following weeks!

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