Charity Insights

 M y work with the charity has sadly come to an end, and the final product is even better than we expected.

This week we’ve strung together all the lesson plans and ‘water drops’ to actually form a programme pack. This has meant creating the information sheets and pitch ready to send the packs over to the schools, including fundraising materials, thorough explanations of how the scheme will run and outlining the key values of the charity. It’s also meant I’ve made a verrrry long list of things to do for the staff taking over my role, who will be in charge of producing the actual teaching materials: worksheets, presentations and lesson teaching guides.

Working with this charity has been amazing, I’ve been able to work with some brilliant people who are incredibly hard working and it’s really opened my eyes to the possibilities when it comes to international development. It’s undeniably rewarding and there are some fantastic small charities out there – I’ll definitely be looking for more to get involved with when I’m back in London and of course return to The Long Well Walk in the future.

Leaving the internship is made all the sweeter by being able to see the amount of work we’ve actually achieved over the past four weeks. We’ve completed everything that we wanted to do and more, and it gives me a really warm feeling to know that the materials and structure that I’ve helped to create will be used over the coming years to raise awareness and money to support people living in sub-Saharan Africa. It goes without saying that taking part in the Charity Insights Scheme has given me invaluable skills, experience and inspiration – I couldn’t recommend it enough and would like to thank everybody at The Long Well Walk for having me. J

Read Final week at The Long Well Walk in full

It’s the end of week 3 and wow this internship is flying by. Thankfully, all the work we’ve been doing is finally seeming to make some sense and the random lesson activities have now been fleshed out into fully comprehensive lesson plans.

The week has been spent detailing lesson objectives, fighting with table formatting in Wo
rd (complete pet hate) and pinging ideas backwards and forwards to teachers to gain as much feedback as we can.

We’ve also spent time creating an enterprise project, designed for secondary school pupils where we will run a competition to engage students in an entrepreneurial challenge. This will involve students creating and carrying out a business plan, selling products from our sister charity Watermade. This is another amazing charity which works with small communities in Africa who produce things such as bracelets and necklaces (made from paper!) which are then sold in the UK for a much higher price than they would in their home country. Income like this really helps to build a community and allows for more investment so that the overall economy grows. The ideas of international development and entrepreneurship are vital for the younger generation, to create more people who, like Liam, can work with improving lives in a sustainable way. 

Read Week 3 at The Long Well Walk in full

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.

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!

Read Week 2 at The Long Well Walk in full

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.

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. 

Read Week 1 at The Long Well Walk in full