Month: July 2017

My first day at Surfers Against Sewage

Today I started my internship at Surfers Against Sewage, a Cornwall based charity focused on improving UK water quality and the reduction of single use plastics, as well as broader issues such as marine conservation and climate change.

Having just launched their new project ‘Plastic free Coastlines’, a positive response to an accumulation of plastics with an area of 5x the size of the UK (newly branded ‘Wasteland‘), there is a vibrant and energetic atmosphere in the office. The project aims to engage communities and businesses in the problems that Wasteland is creating, and provides a free action plan, inspiring you to ‘join the resistance’. I’ll be tasked with public engagement at the infamous Boardmasters festival next week, hoping to collect , collate and report on data from the public, and signing up as many people as possible to this effective response to a very important issue. I’ll also be helping co-ordinate large scale beach cleans at the festival, all to come next week.

Today, though, I was tasked with an entirely different project. Ellie, (a member of the SAS team) is leading ‘Be the Change’, a new education programme which aims to inform primary schools about litter via interactive workshops. With the charity growing at a rapid rate in recent years, last year the project extended outside of Cornwall and reached Birmingham and Essex. This year, they aim to engage with schools in all areas of the UK. This required thorough research into primary schools in areas such as Newcastle. I researched all registered primary schools in Newcastle, and subsequently created a spreadsheet with contact information including social media links and important names, hoping that this will provide an easy platform for the charity to work from when it comes to engaging in communities that they haven’t reached yet. Out of the 75 schools, we hope to confirm and finalise a minimum of 5 physical tours to schools in Newcastle, with of course many more to other parts of the UK. ‘Hard to reach areas’ such as Northern Ireland and all UK islands will be engaged via online interactive talks and podcasts to ensure no one is left out.

I’ve also got a couple more projects to balance in the coming weeks, one involving a re-mapping of a nationwide map on the SAS website to smaller scale regional maps, hopefully allowing me to use my GIS mapping skills learnt during my geology degree. The other involves me helping with the launch of the ever-growing Beach Clean Box Communities project, providing physical boxes for coastal communities to utilise. More to come on these!!

Overall a fun day and a great crew. Excited for the rest to come!

Looking Forward with The K&C Foundation

My second and third weeks at the K&C Foundation have seen the office attempting to look forward from the Grenfell Tower fire and move back to normal, but with around 10 cheques still arriving daily, the fire is definitely at the forefront of everyone’s minds.

I started week two continuing to work on my ‘Big Donors’ List, which would allow the foundation to plan for the future and efficiently be able to recognise those who have been especially generous and make sure that they had been thanked. The data that the foundation receives from the different mediums of donation is often cryptic and required a certain amount of detective work to make sure that donors were thanked for the correct amounts. It has been really fantastic to read all of the different ways that people have fund raised for the victims of the tower and everyone in the office often becomes slightly teary and moved at some of the letters we’ve had to read.

Many of the donors who have given to the Grenfell Tower Fund requested to keep in contact with the Foundation, so one of my main activities throughout these two weeks has been identifying donors who live in the Royal Borough of the Kensington and Chelsea and adding them to the database. Although this task did seem slightly monotonous at times, I felt good knowing that these were people who will eventually donate again to the K&C Foundation to support their other campaigns.

In week three as a break from adding to the Database, (As much as I now am a professional at ‘Advantage Fundraiser’ it was nice to have a release from adding addresses), I was asked to do some analysis of donor and recipient location of the 2015-16 Winter Warmth Campaign. This campaign raises funds so that older people who face hardship during the winter months can be helped with their heating costs and keep warm. I mapped the locations of the hundreds of recipients and donors to try and identify a trend, which did turn out as hypothesised. This map I created will be used as a visual aid to demonstrate to the trustees at their meeting in September how the campaign geographically works.

My highlight of the middle two weeks has been attending a couple of meetings with local charities with the charity coordinator, just to see how they were getting on post Grenfell and here their opinions of the schemes in place to help those in need and to gauge the thoughts and emotions of the public. I found this most useful because I was really exposed to how a charity like the K&C Foundation interacts with those they support and how the build and keep up these relationships.

I’ve also had the opportunity during these two weeks to edit things here and there on the K&C Foundation’s website. This was going to be one of my main tasks pre starting my internship here and I was grateful to learn how the foundation runs their site. One of their main priorities recently has been to keep their social media up to date, and as their has not been the manpower to do this during the tumultuous  time after the Grenfell fire, this is something I hope to start with in my final week.

I am shocked at how fast my time here has gone and I cannot believe that I only really have 5 days left with the ladies at the K&C Office.

 

 

Professional Working Adult

I guess I’m a professional working adult now.  I have a 9 to 5 schedule (being able to relax after work and not have to study pleases me), I commute on the tube at peak hours (and eavesdrop on busy businessmen’s conversations) and I get to tell people I work in Temple (like a hotshot lawyer in a TV series).

Not pictured: the businessman who looked at me weird for taking this photo

These middle weeks have been where I’ve done the bulk of my work. I wrote a news report on digital democracy, did an extensive literature review on data economy, and compiled about 10 case studies on different enterprises from around the world. Basically, I read a lot and wrote a lot. And I loved it. Of course, I did this sitting on a couch whilst looking out the window at the Tate Modern on one side and the London Eye on the other, because have I mentioned the views here are amazing?

In between all this research, I was also invited to attend a presentation by a colleague who works on government innovation. Aside from a great learning experience on public speaking, it was interesting to see a topic I’d been reading so much about come to life in such an engaging and captivating way, and I feel very fortunate I was able to attend.

Another exciting thing happened: I met the group of interns at Nesta. What a lovely bunch! It was nice talking to people closer to my age, and hearing about their experiences after university was very valuable and relevant to my near future. But more importantly, they taught me the tricks for getting bigger rations at the café downstairs and all the juicy office gossip.

I can’t believe I only have 1 week left of my internship. Next week’s post is going to be filled with electronic tears and Adele songs playing in the background. Can’t wait.

 

Highlight of the week: Being introducing by the interns to a life-changing falafel place just 5 minutes away from the office. The rations are huge, the falafels are so crispy, the salads are amazing and the hummus is revolutionary.

Macmillan Weeks 1-2

Macmillan Cancer Support are a charity that aims to improve the lives of people living with cancer in all aspects of  life – from diagnosis, through treatment and living with cancer and even end of life. They have been growing at a rapid rate over the last few years and so you’re pretty much guaranteed to see them around! If you want to find out more information about them, whether it’s to fund raise for them or simply explore their values, the link is here: https://www.macmillan.org.uk/

My internship is based in their office at Albert Embankment, Vauxhall in their technology department – their first ever intern! Within this department there are many sections: Digital, IT security etc. but I am placed in Strategy and Engagement (S&E). As an overview, this involves helping to develop their strategy towards using digital to improve the lives of those affected by cancer… very broad I know! As my internship is 11 weeks long, I don’t have a specific project, as such, to achieve, but am part of a bigger project to research and understand how digital is best used by patients, and how Macmillan may want to develop their strategy in the future.

The first week was very much an introductory week – the first day was an induction day for all the other interns, one in each department. This involved explaining what life at Macmillan was like, incorporating ice breakers, a presentation exercise and simple guides for working at Macmillan like who we can ask for help. There is also an intern-organised fundraising event for us during our time here so we collectively made a list of possible ideas we could do for it. The first and most important thing (for me) that I realised on the first day was how well Macmillan treated their interns and how much time and effort they put into their internship scheme. They really made us feel welcomed and structured it so that we would gain the most out our time there – offering training courses and setting various development workshops for us.

The second day was their Tech Quarterly briefing day which was a day for all of technology to gather and discuss all the things that had been going on for the past 4 months…a lot of information to take in! It was a great networking opportunity and helped me gain an understanding of the organisation as a whole, the problems it faced and its ideas for the future. There were some basic team exercises where we were split up into groups, with people we’d never met, and had to come up with a world record for the company to try and break! After the second day I started to settle in and understand what work I would be doing.

During the rest of the week, and delving into the week after, I was taught how to use Outlook properly, their sharepoint, Outlook calendar and started organising meetings with the people in my department to introduce myself and explain my background and aspirations. Everyone at Macmillan, probably as well in most charities, was so friendly! It was just amazing how talkative, helpful and caring everyone is – definitely a big consideration for working in the charity sector one day.

I met with my manager in my second week to talk about the work I’d be doing, and I was given a few article to read about the project and a list of health apps to create a spreadsheet and review. We arranged to have a weekly meetings to review my progress but made it clear that I could ask anyone around me for help. There was also a careers workshop for the interns which consisted of evaluating our skills, which one we liked and wanted to develop, and priorities of values and how we might develop our careers in the future. This was extremely helpful and once again, was amazed at how much consideration had been put in for us.

Battling the fear of not-wanting to seem too keen against the desire to socialise with the other interns more, I organised a weekly intern lunch with the interns in which they all seemed to express the same fear – if any advice, I would always say don’t hesitate, seizing every opportunity means that you’ll make the most out of your time and now thanks to that initial lunch, we’ve set up a weekly pub trip too to explore a different pub every week!

At the end of the third week, we had what was called the London Takeover where everyone in the organisation would go out to a designated tube or train station to raise money for Macmillan with buckets, dressed in Green! This was an amazing end to my third week at Macmillan and it was lovely to hear the kind messages by people donating; sharing their stories of loved ones with cancer being helped so much by Macmillan.

The first few weeks have mainly be catching up on what the project is and what direction we’d like to go but I’m sure there’ll be loads more work in the weeks ahead!

 

What does this sentence mean?

If you understand what you have read so far in this post, then you would definitely know the difference between the sentences ‘GDP rose in 2015’ and ‘GDP rose consistently from 2010 to 2015.’ So would a Natural Language Processing (NLP) programme. Some NLP programmes might even one-up us mere mortals by giving the ‘dependency parsing’, ‘parts of speech tags’, ‘named entities’ and other sentences attributes that only learned and esteemed linguistic practitioners like Noam Chomsky, George Orwell and Donald Trump would understand.

Well, NLP programmes (or at least the one we’re currently using) might be able to parse a claim like ‘GDP growth averaged 7.3% under the previous Labour administration’ (warning: fake news; please don’t take this statistic for truth) and flood you with a deluge of sentence attributes. But they are currently unable to understand what this claim entails, and more importantly, the data that should be sought to verify this claim. NLP has yet to advance to the point whereby it can take in any sentence ever conceivable by humans and spit out all the intricacies and subtleties in the sentence. And so we currently have to make do with humans to bridge the gap.

We looked through a database of claims that were made (solely) regarding GDP and identified the ones whose sentence structures were more common. These sentences were then parsed by the NLP programme that we used, which would output the words in the sentence that corresponded to certain parts of speech / categories. For example, ‘GDP rose consistently from 2010 to 2015’ would give us ‘GDP’ as the ‘topic’, ‘rose’ as the ‘verb’ (or type of flower), ‘consistently’ as the ‘checking_modifier’ (a more glorified term for ‘adverb’) and the years 2010 and 2015 as ‘time’. We could then link certain outputs to specific data that we had to obtain to factcheck the claims. As with any other human endeavor, we are making progress in this area. Our current idea is not to factcheck all claims regarding GDP that are made by Jeremy Corbyn, The Sun or Lord Buckethead, but rather the claims that happen more often in the media.

Fingers crossed, we should get an initial working prototype by next week.

 

Unforgettable experience – The last week at Marches Energy Agency

All good thing has come to an end, as my journey at MEA reaches its destination day by day I feel more and more emotional like I am already missing the place. So much things happened in the past four weeks, apart from demonstrating my research results and learning from my colleague I also managed to show them how bad an ‘Asian flush’ can get (I will never drink with an empty stomach again). Anyway, let me tell you what happened in my last few days at MEA.

The last week was quite rough to be honest, apart from doing the planned charity research I was also assigned to do some document classification and research work. This happens because one of my supervisor was quite happy with my presentation at week 3 and decided to let me help him prepare some materials for future meetings. Although I had to work extra hours at my home it’s always better to be busy and excited for the big finale. At the moment MEA is interested in the work of other charities that share the same goal, especially in their project and funding information. My job is to identify successful and interesting service of those organisation and evaluate the potential for MEA to learn from them. Apart from general service like helplines and energy advisor, some organisations offer local energy workshop and work with school to teach students about green energy. Considering the Shrewsbury high school is close by this could be one of the many service MEA offers the future. Also, Because Shrewsbury is not a large city so the funding can be a limited factor, some charities not only receive fund from government but also from companies and larger organisation. Although it’s usually not as awesome as government funding it’s enough to hold local events. More advanced charity (mainly locate in London) can even offer heat screen service to detect heat loss level and gives out EPC, but it might be too much for the present MEA, and many more. For the document work it’s more general, since I did research before it’s just time consuming, no big problems raised.

As I wrote those down the time just pasted Thursday midnight and now is Friday. I am going to deliver my final project to the team and throw a small pizza party for lunch. Can’t believe this is the last day of work. I will never forget the time I spent here and will miss it very much.

Week 2

Week 2 is now over and I’m happy to say I’ve achieved more than I thought in the second week. After all the research I had completed in the first week it was time to organise some ideas and start building up the presentations. This was harder than I first thought.

When first started compiling different parts of my research into a presentation I realised there was a bit more to it than just adding information. The trickiest part I’ve been finding to achieve is  conveying the devastating effects that neuro-disability has on people’s lives whilst maintaining a light-hearted, fun presentation for the children. Another obstacle that I’ve encountered is trying to cater the presentations to the different age groups and academic levels in schools. Researching school curriculums and contacting old teachers has helped significantly in overcoming this hurdle.

My project has also required me to show a creative side to myself, which I didn’t even know existed, when trying to design and come up with interactive games or activities that can involve the children. I had been brainstorming some ideas with my supervisor, but now that she’s gone away on holiday I’m having to come up with the ideas myself which is a lot more difficult than you may think.

So, after the second week I’ve managed to finish a rough version of my presentations aimed at secondary school kids in the years 7-8 and 9-10 whilst simultaneously discovering my creative side, it’s been great.

Am I saving lives yet?

It’s Wednesday, time 23:21. I ‘m sitting in the kitchen, reflecting on the past three days. That’s it so far – only three days at Anthony Nolan*. How is it possible that I feel so different than on a Sunday evening?

Are you thinking of doing an internship in a charity? Let me tell you how you’d feel. At the beginning, you are extremely excited. You plan your project, it seems to be the most groundbreaking thing in the world and you cannot wait to pursue it. Then Sunday comes, and you are supposed to start work on Monday morning. Am I good enough? Will they give me anything to do? Is my project really helpful for the charity? Do I have enough skills to work in a place like that? You’ve never done something like that before, so stress gets you and you may even think that it would be better if you just spent your summer working in a pub close to your home.

I can also tell you how you’d feel after the first few days in the Charity.  You will come back home from work after going for drinks with your coworkers, you’ll see your flatmates and when they ask you: “how’s work?”, you’ll honestly say: “it’s loads of work but it’s amazing, I am so happy to be there!’. The excitement is back, you are full of energy and ideas and you are proud of your decision to apply for the Charity Insights Programme.

 

*Anthony Nolan is a charity that saves lives of people with blood cancer. It was the world’s first register that matched donors of blood stem cells or bone marrow to people with blood disorders that desperately needed life-saving transplants. Currently, there are more than 600,000 potential donors on the register. The foundation raises awareness, educates and provides information about the register and donation. Furthermore, they conduct world-class research which leads to improved success rates of transplants and better quality of support provided to patients. Their integration of scientific research with raising awareness, finding donors and supporting patients is, in my opinion, the most important aspect of their work in helping people with blood disorders. I am currently working with The Register Development Team, which recruits donors through a number of different channels and is now looking for new ways to expand this and reach their ambitious objective of recruiting 100,000 stem cell donors per year.

My first week is focused on getting to know everyone, learning about different departments, preparing my first report (organizing an “Away Day” for the team), analyzing their recruitment strategies, participations in meetings for the upcoming projects. It is incredible. Highlights? Being the part of a life-saving process, getting all the stationary I could ever only dreamt about,  going for drinks with coworkers after the 2nd day of work, yoga with coworkers after the 3rd day of work and the list of projects and things I got from my coordinator to work on!

PS. They made me a coffee. Am I even an intern?

Name that tractor!?

Week 1 completed, that’s 25% of my internship. Sacrewell farm is now ~0.5% closer to the public unveiling of their collection.

The William Scott Abott Trust is an agricultural education charity with a visitor’s centre near Peterborough. This idyllic site, with its 18th century water mill, charismatic staff and farmyard animals, is my office for 4 weeks. What a hardship for me to bare! Leisurely walking round the 550 acre organic fields and visiting the alpaca on my lunch break.

When I’m not enjoying the beautiful setting I am focused on cataloguing their collection of farm equipment. Ranging from a 7m long hay baler machine to a 20cm spanner. The collection has been growing steadily with no official system of storing or identifying the objects. Much of it has been untouched for years, encrusted with dirt and entwined with weeds. There is a race against time to save the objects from the weather and arrange them a permanent home at the farm where they can be enjoyed by the public.

        

STEP 1: set up a cataloguing system

I sought help from the Museum of English Rural Life, Reading. I met with the Assistant Curator, who was extremely knowledgeable and keen to share their successful cataloguing system. As I am starting Scarewell’s cataloguing system from scratch I am using Microsoft Excel for its adaptability and ease of use, plus it’s free!

STEP 1.5: unforeseen problems

The week also involved a ‘fun’ afternoon of clearing the rubble/weeds/dried leaves from the collection storage areas in 32*C. It was worth the mess and dust filled air as it uncovered a few hidden treasures.

STEP 2: identify objects using my own knowledge & online research

This is when I really began to imagine how things were used on the farm. They ceased being just rusty and rotten objects and became tools which farmers spent hours using to work the land and bring food to our tables.

NEXT WEEK

STEP 3: get second opinions and correctly identify all objects

The project is progressing faster than I had anticipated. Great news as I can dig deeper into the storage areas and identify more objects from the seemingly infinite collection…

…STEP 4: grow the archive

The week ended Friday afternoon with my laptop and camera giving up the ghost simultaneously. Thank goodness I had been backing up my work! This blog comes to you from a fully repaired laptop. Bring on week 2!

Spending my daytimes at London Nightline

London Nightline are a charity providing a confidential listening, emotional support and practical information service to London’s students. London Nightline began in 1971 where it was modelled around the Samaritan’s with the key difference that all volunteers are students and the service is tailored to students needs. Nightline was set up as a response to a spate of student suicides at Imperial. Originally based in South Kensington and known as West London Nightline the charity then spread to address the needs of students across the city.

You can visit their website here: http://nightline.org.uk/

 

The aim of my time at Nightline is to interview volunteers and service users about their experiences. These responses will be used to create a report of recommendations to improve how the charity handles various aspects of how it runs from volunteer training through to the policies and procedures which are used to govern the way we take calls. In addition, I will use people’s responses to create some publicity to help recruit next year’s cohort of volunteers.

 

My first week has involved putting in the groundwork by designing the interview questions, contacting volunteers and service users to arrange interviews and drafting the report structure. Also, I have looked at existing feedback from the volunteer end of year survey and caller feedback form. The aim of my interviews is to expand on areas for improvement shown in these existing forms of feedback. The process of looking through existing feedback has also highlighted the need to improve the way the charity collects feedback. To address this, I’ve designed a new feedback form for the website which will automatically collect feedback into coherent and useful data.

 

Next week I’m going to start interviewing volunteers and from then the project should be in full swing!