Category: Charity Insights 2015

Friends of the Earth – next step

Just a quick summary; I am doing my CI project with Birmingham Friends of the Earth; and I am looking at the waste management strategy in Birmingham and how different/better this can be, so we can ask the city council to make a better deal when the current contract comes to the end. It seems quite logical to expect to benefit more from waste (‘waste isn’t rubbish’); and also get local companies to deal with it (so to keep the money in the region and more jobs, etc.)

I have had some joys focusing on investigation into two things. One is about what other similar (in size, demography, etc.) cities are doing that Birmingham is not and could learn from. There are other cities, like Bristol, that has been doing some quite nice and green initiatives to drive their waste prevention and minimisation; and also reuse and recycling. I am looking at various cities in the country to see what they are doing and what can be learned from them.

recyclewe all remeber to recycle, don’t we? 🙂

The other things is about local capabilities. Of course, the council will need to ensure the waste issue is looked after properly. And if it is to use the local companies to deliver the waste management, it needs to make sure there are capabilities to do this. I am looking at what we have in the region and whether it is possible (of course with required development when the time comes) to undertake the tasks locally.

These tasks have kept me busy for most of my time. But in addition to these, learning from the other volunteers and also workers here is the real learning for me. There are various people with different views and background, but all with passion for what BFEO seeks to achieve.

More is coming next week… 🙂

Bedfont Lakes Country Park, Week 3

The Eurasian water shrew is an insectivorous rodent that grows to around only 15cm long! Despite its unimpressive size, it has venomous saliva which it uses to temporarily paralyse prey, such as river fly larvae, which it catches by acrobatically diving to river beds. Due to their small size, water shrews have a high metabolism and must consume about half of their own body weight in insects a day or risk starvation!

Part of my project with the Ecologist at Bedfont Lakes is to investigate whether these tiny mammals are present along the river banks of some of Hounslow Boroughs nature reserves. This involved setting small mammal bait traps along the River Crane. The traps are essentially cuboidal steel boxes stuffed with meal worms and dead leaves, which have spring loaded doors that close when the shrew brushes a trip wire on its way into the trap (they are completely humane and do not harm the shrew in any way). These are then left in sheltered areas or underneath plants overnight and checked first thing the next day to see if anything has been caught.

wasserspitzmaus_water_shrew_549k2 (For those of you who are wondering what a water shrew looks like! )

It was predicted that water shrews would be absent from the area, due to overly dense vegetation and a pollution event that occurred in 2013, and so far we have found this to be true. The exciting thing about this though is that if this continues to be the case upon further surveying, then we can definitively say that they are absent and look into introducing a number of water shrews to the area in the hope that they will start a local population.

As a Zoology student, I have studied many Ecology modules and it has been fantastic to see Ecology in practise and get away from the realm of theory and textbooks. There are so many practical applications of Zoology and Ecology that lecturers are unable to expose us to in the limited time they have for teaching, so I have really enjoyed being involved in this long process of species introduction. Knowing how to successfully introduce species to either new areas or areas where they have become extinct could become so important in the near future considering the rapid rate at which so many ecosystems are being degraded. The good thing however, is that we (humans!) are getting better and better at habitat restoration and noticing warning signs for when a species population may be in decline, and only through this small scale trial and error experience, such as this example with water shrews, will we really be able learn ways in which we can remedy any damage we have made and live in harmony with nature.

 

AB

(Left: small mammal bait tube left under footpath by River Crane, right: Bedfont Lakes’s Ecologist Gareth trying to spot a good site to leave the trap in)

Final week at The Long Well Walk

 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.

11147125_965158476861679_6119876952805016948_n20300_977505665626960_2968927395651046689_n

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

Week 3 at The Long Well Walk

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.

10500385_908373559206838_2774963130235542067_n

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. hqdefault

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.

10730931_975792015798325_4618171078484246023_n

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.

1470421_674504619260401_1551207568_n

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

Week Three at WildHearts

microtyco-2

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!

nihr_colour

 

 

Getting Settled…

During my time with the internship we’ll be designing and constructing a sensory garden for a local supported living facility, funded and maintained by a charity called FitzRoy. FitzRoy is a great organisation I’ve worked with before; they focus on helping and supporting families and individuals with learning disabilities. For more information visit http://www.fitzroy.org/

As I mentioned I have worked with FitzRoy before, this is why I asked to intern here. While working there last summer I noticed that their garden was in a state of disrepair and so I proposed a project to my supervisor. I wanted to create a sensory garden. Sensory gardens are a fantastic tool for individuals with learning disabilities and physical handicaps. It allows them to engage with the environment in ways they’re not necessarily used to.

Sustainability is an important consideration to take into account when deciding whether the project was feasible. The goal was to create a garden that can easily be maintained as the residents would be the ones tending to it. However, some of these residents are physically disabled, so ease of access for wheelchairs was a higher priority. This complicated designs as raised beds would be preferable for wheel chair users though not ideal when considering costs, material availability and man power. The decisions would ultimately be decided by the residents and staff as at the end of the day they would be the ones maintaining and using it daily.

WildHearts – The Second Week

WildHeartsLogo_4ValuesThe focus of this week was to put my research from last week into good use and start acquiring new guests for the Edinburgh Global Entrepreneurial Leaders (GEL) summit.

Given that the GEL is a unique educational experience, it is very relevant to school pupils and educators. WildHearts have a great deal of experience in working with schools through their Micro-Tyco for schools programme and the GEL is the perfect platform for maintain engagement with schools post Micro-Tyco. On this front, my task was to sort through past Micro-Tyco records and compile them into a single database, this made it simple to see which schools have taken part in the competition over the years and in turn the school representatives to invite. For some cases the details were not complete and research had to be conducted through school handbooks and local authority websites.

Once I had a list of potential attendees I drafted a number of invitation emails. These invitations were tailored to organisation type and separate versions of the invitation were produced for high schools, primary schools and commercial businesses. I sent these drafts to my supervisor and after some feedback and editorial changes the invitations were ready to send out.

The invitations were distributed by email via the use of a mail merge, a function of Microsoft Office that allows you to create and send multiple copies of an email with minor changes in each copy such as recipient name and email address. After distributing the invitation it was not long before I started getting responses.

Further tasks for this week included reaching out to schools already signed up for the summit, gathering the names of the representatives that will be attending from each specific school, offering additional places to schools with increased demand and looking into various Boston based companies as part of my research for the Boston GEL. I also proof read and made suggestions for the GEL brochure which will be distributed on the event days.

At the halfway-point of my internship I feel that I have learnt a great deal and managed to make some worthwhile contributions to the organisation. I am confident that the second half of this placement will be just as valuable and I look forward to working on a new range of tasks.