Category: 2017 Charity Insights

Au Revoir

I concluded my 4 weeks at Full Fact a few days back, and as cliche as it sounds, I had enjoyed every minute – including the daily bus commute – of it.

We had built on my predecessor’s work, integrating together the three different stages of the automated factchecking process that we had decided on. Though 4 weeks isn’t a long period of time – considering that Imperial’s academic terms are 11 weeks long (from week 0 – yes, week 0 – through week 10) – it was interesting to see how our project had developed from start to finish.

The ‘strong and stable’ bridge which I had mentioned in my previous post(s) was crucial in integrating the first and third stage of the automated factchecking process. Crucial communication was key in this area. I needed to know what my comrade’s outputs (in terms of Five Year Plans) from the first stage were. This stage involved using Natural Language Processing (NLP) to parse the key terms in a sentence, and my comrade and I saw eye-to-eye – surprising given that he’s a head taller than me – on the key terms that the NLP programme should extract.

Up next were the outcomes from the third (and last) stage. After several daily discussions, we were on the same frequency – 60.231 Hertz to be exact – regarding the output for this stage. We decided on returning a dictionary – not the Merriam-Webster type, but rather of Pythonic form – of data relevant to the claim. For example, the relevant data for the claim ‘GDP rose in 2015’ would be the absolute GDP in 2014 and 2015, as well as the resulting percentage increase.

We had fine-tuned the factchecking process for several of the more common claims involving ‘GDP’, although more work needs to be done (especially on the NLP end) for more complicated claims, such as, ‘GDP growth during the Thatcher years wasn’t as good as it was during Cameron’s time.’ Also, this has to be scaled to other topics, such as inflation, immigration etc., although many of the common claims in these different areas have the same sentence structure. For example, ‘GDP grew in 2015’ and ‘Inflation rose in 2015’ could be interpreted in a similar way.

Why not join Team Up yourself?

Sadly, my time at Team Up has come to an end. I successfully completed the progress and baseline assessments mentioned previously and started the long process of updating the lesson materials. This involved mapping the lessons to the key learning points on the syllabus and finding example exam-style questions for each lesson. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to implement many of the changes I identified. However, whoever takes over the task in the future has a set of detailed notes and instructions regarding what changes need to be made.

I learned a lot from my time at Team Up: I experienced working in an office environment, I worked collaboratively in a small team and individually towards the end of the internship. I learned about the day-to-day running of a small charity. I was assigned a single task to work on throughout my time at the office, however many of the other employees have very varied roles and responsibilities. You have to be very flexible and open-minded to work in this environment, as well as realistic about what you are able to achieve and when you have taken on too much work.

I am looking forward to continuing to work with Team Up throughout the coming academic year. Unfortunately, I have to wait until my timetable comes through to see if it allows me to sign up for a tuition session in a school. But, if this doesn’t work, I will continue my engagement as Chair of Imperial’s Team Up society!

If you think that you could share your knowledge and experience with students from disadvantaged backgrounds, why not join Team Up yourself? Opportunities are posted on their website or come and visit us at Fresher’s Fair!

Candle in the Wind

My last week at Nesta. Queue the classic “Time flies!” and “It feels like it was only yesterday when I arrived” and “We’re all going to die someday” clichés. It was a week of many “lasts”: the last catch-up with my supervisor, my last lunch with the interns, the last time I logged into my Nesta email, the last time I had a glass of water at the office… Okay, I’m getting too nostalgic.

The end of my internship consisted of me scrambling about trying to finish up all the little projects I’d been doing over the past month. It was both satisfying and sad (and stressful) adding the finishing touches to my reports with the tight deadline of Friday afternoon, which kept inching closer. Despite this, I still had the chance to have a few last coffees with some colleagues and get some last minute life advice. Oh, and I also received a visit by Jessica Noon of the Careers Office, to chat about my experience and to show off the coolest office ever.

LIES! But good lies.

My last proper act as a Nesta intern was supposed to be a meeting with the other interns to discuss the internship process; an informal reunion to just bounce ideas off of each other. Little did I know it was all a ruse to get me to a room where I was greeted by all the people in the Policy & Research team for a small goodbye party. It was very sweet and unexpected, and I even got to give a little thank you speech. But the sweetest thing of all was the blueberry tart cake they bought for the occasion. These people know how to make an intern happy!

Working at Nesta has been an eye-opener for me. 4 weeks ago, I knew pretty much nothing of the world of policy-making and innovation, and now I’m subscribed to at least a dozen newsletters on the topic.  It has shown me that there are so many fascinating projects going on around us that we don’t hear about unless it’s related to our line of work, and we should put more effort into discovering and understanding them. I’ve learnt that working in the world of policy research is fascinating, but most importantly I’ve met people with amazing stories and unique perspectives on the world. And of course, my fancy political small talk has really upped its game.

 

Thank you for having me, Nesta, and thank you Charity Insights for making it happen.

 

Highlight of the week: The proper answer should be “All the experiences I’ve lived and all the things I’ve learned over my time at Nesta.” But really, it’s the blueberry tart cake.

A dream for a better Healthcare system

The first two weeks have flown by at Healthwatch Bolton and I’m happy to say that I’ve managed to settle myself on a desk space that is usually free. In this time, I’ve been reborn as a coffee gremlin. It really doesn’t help when there is a funky coffee shop right around the corner!

In the office, I’ve hopped from desk to desk to shadow the in-house community engagement officers and research officers. Developing my understanding of research at collection and analysis was essential for me to start designing a project plan.

On my third day in the office, a visit to the BRASS (Befriending Refugees and Asylum Seekers) Bolton Centre and a review of past case notes captured my attention towards the under-represented and growing refugee population in the Bolton borough. Furthermore, in the past year the borough welcomed 255 refugees from countries including Somalia, Sudan and Congo. This equates to 34 per cent of the total that came to the UK under the Gateway Protection Programme. Realising the cultural and language barriers that may hinder the data collection of this research, I attached myself to the engagement officers who filled me in with their tips and tricks for spontaneous rapport building.

Despite the odd tricky encounter, I’ve loved every moment of my time at BRASS. Almost immediately, I felt at home with my new friends. Not only have people felt comfortable enough to share their deepest concerns and health problems, many have been supportive of my project and some have repeatedly asked me to return and spend more time with them.

Health and social care research is harder than it seems; but the mitigating factor for me is to see the miraculous job of fantastic service providers.

The Last Days at the K&C Foundation

My final couple of days at the K&C Foundation has been an eventful one. Nearly 7 weeks after the Grenfell Tower fire and cheques are still coming in. What I now like to call MY cheque database is looking very hefty and it was a sad day on Thursday when I had to teach my colleague how to use it again, as I have been in charge of it for so long. A couple of very exciting donations came in this week as well- the biggest I’d seen yet! It is very shocking to have a colleague shout ‘Charlotte you have to read these numbers for me, I just can’t believe what I’m seeing.’, and to then read that EasyJet’s flight collection had raised over £200,000 for the Grenfell Tower Fund! The atmosphere in the office was amazing as we were all shell shocked at the sum!

The focus of this week has mainly been on social media and on the semi rebranding that the K&C Foundation has been undergoing. One area that the charity has tried to improve on is in the amount that they update their followers on different social platforms, and their weakest has been facebook. I helped the team to understand how to make different people admins on the page, and then undertook the role of updating all of their information and deleting anything that they didn’t want anymore. The mini rebranding has mostly revolved around a change of colour, moving from the classic blue to a magenta, or is it maroon… or is it purple? We enjoyed have team meetings about the theme and it was very funny attempting to find a name for the shade we chose! I then got to work with updating everything with this new colour- the logo, email signatures, branded letters etc etc.

The website has been another of my main focusses this week. This was going to be one of my top objectives prior to the Grenfell Tower and this final week has allowed me to get started there finally. I trawled through the pages, removing any information that was duplicated and changed layouts to make everything flow better and make more sense. The website is something the K&C Foundation is still not happy with, but I’ve been glad to contribute to an ‘okay’ interim state, until the time comes for a completely new rebranding.

This week again I have been able to sit in on another couple of meetings including one that was hosted in the Berkley Hotel in Knightsbridge- perks of the job! It has been my favourite part of my 4 weeks being able to go and listen to how the foundation liaises with businesses and other charities.

Before starting my internship I thought that 4 weeks was a long time. Turns out 20 days of work completely flies by. Working in a small team has been amazing as you can really get to know everyone and it was easy to feel completely at ease.  I am really going to miss this tiny office in Latimer Road, and although I didn’t really do anything that had previously been planned I feel like I have contributed much to the K&C Foundation and hope that my time here has been as valuable to them as I feel it has been to me.

Breaking into a vicarage, chatting with Yorkshire-folk and walking a dog

My internship so far has consisted of three days spent in Bedale, and seven days work at home. Firstly, it was important that I fully understood what was required of me by St Gregory’s Church and the community. The Church is undergoing a huge redevelopment program, with an aim to make the space more versatile. My roles are the following:

  • Design a new wordpress based website, with a heritage section allowing interactive ‘drone-eye’ exploration of the grounds
  • Design websites for three charities working in the town, namely: a foodbank, debt advice service and bereavement befriending service
  • Write document for Church of England proposing technology installations to the interior of The Church. Full WiFi coverage, and retracting projector screens. Will allow the space to be used for public speaking, music performances, rehearsals etc. It is very important that the technology installations are discrete so as not to detract from the cultural authenticity of the building.

I met with a number of committee members, to try to understand what is desired from a new website. There is a resounding fear of change, many of the committee feeling uncomfortable about the idea of new technology. Many have been with the church for a very long time, but it’s important that the facilities can be enjoyed not only by long term users, but new visitors.

The current progress on the website can be seen at http://45.32.180.144/. Most of the structure is built, with a few bugs needing squashing still. Before this project my web design knowledge was very basic, but I followed this course: https://internetingishard.com/html-and-css/ which has been fantastic. A few days later I had a very good grounding in CSS styling, and could apply these skills to customising the chosen wordpress theme with my own design elements. The other challenge has been hosting the website. Rather than paying for a packaged solution on a shared server (easy to set up, but limited with functionality) I chose to use a virtual hosted server. This allows shell access to the server meaning I’m not in anyway limited with functionality of a typical ‘wordpress server’, and I can make quick fixes through SSH when I accidentally break the whole website with some dodgy PHP code.

I used my drone along with my handheld camera to capture the shots for the video at the top of the homepage. The full video can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtqVnX-dTCw. I’d never flown the drone inside before, and having one-of-a-kind artefacts within inches of the blades wasn’t the safest introduction either. I’m delighted with the results, especially the shot which pulls backwards from the stained glass through the middle of the church.

Going forward, I need to finish adding the content from the old church website to the new one. Then, I need to learn how I can create an interactive heritage section, with an interactive drone fly around app. I need to write the technology installation proposal for the Church of England, and build the charity websites. I’m confident I can finish all this on schedule, and will be back to Bedale for a couple more days to meet with the charity leadership teams to discuss their requirements.

Below are some photos from my adventures

I stayed with the rector and his wife (family friends). The rector accidentally locked us out of the house, so I used my ladder skills to save the day
Walking the rector’s dog ‘Oswald’, he doesn’t like walks
The town of Bedale, taken from the drone
St Gregory’s Church. The grounds are extensive and continue into the trees and beyond.

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!