News

Derbyshire Intergenerational Project is a National Award Winner

Gill Clarke, Derbyshire's Intergenerational Project Manager recently nominated the Chair of Swadlincote 50+ Forum, Gill Farrington, for a TalkTalk unsung digital heroes award for her service to the community. Gill F organises intergenerational IT projects around South Derbyshire aiming to break down the barriers between the generations by allowing the young people to share their skills and knowledge with the older members of the community. This idea not only brings the generations together improving social cohesion but provides digital inclusion allowing older residents to keep in touch with friends and family and shop online, amongst other things. These projects are supported by Derbyshire's Intergenerational Project Manager.

Gill won the East Midlands regional award along with £5000 and free broadband for 18 months in order to create more projects. The award ceremony took place at the House of Lords on 24th November when Gill was selected as the National Winner and secured a total of £10,000 plus the free broadband. The judges who selected the overall winner were Charles Dunstone, CEO of the TalkTalk Group, Professor Tanya Byron who produced the Byron Review and Martha Lane Fox, the UK's first ever Digital Champion and co-founder of lastminute.com.

Thinking Spaces

ROWA!’s bid to the Transformation Fund was successful.  Funded by the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, this project will use the money to kick start a “revolution” in informal learning, by opening up new learning spaces to more learners and encourage informal, self-organised learning.

The aim of our project, Thinking Spaces, will be to inspire and develop self-organised workplace and community learning by creating resourced spaces for groups to explore and expand their interests through reading.

Based in Erewash, the project partners will include Erewash Partnership Ltd, Erewash CVS and WashArts, and together we will plan a timetable and community approach for delivery.  Think—a film club in a chippy … poetry reading in the front of a shop … researching local history in the back of a church … learning about child development, or cloud-spotting, or art, or politics or almost anything.

The Thinking Space projects will be supported by ROWA! and its partners until 31st March 2010, by which time we hope that they will be self-sustaining.

PEEP Learning Together

ROWA! will be using the PEEP (Peers Early Education Programme) Learning Together programme to enhance the literacy support for families using
Children’s Centres.  Over the next two years PEEP will become available in every Children’s Centre in Derbyshire, or as outreach support, so helping to improve the
literacy readiness of pre-school children and developing literacy skills within their families. 

Family Reading Matters

Derbyshire is one of four authorities which has been chosen by the National Literacy Trust (NLT) to pilot this strategy to support families to create homes rich in reading, writing, speaking and listening. It’s great to welcome Angela back as the Strategic Co-ordinator to lead this project which is being funded by DCSF.
This Derbyshire Partnership project will include County and District council services, Health Services, Community Safety, the VCI sector and social housing services.

The aims of the pilot are:

• to map the ways in which literacy support is available to families and the take up of these services;
• to improve partnership working of agencies who either support literacy or work with families to improve the development of family reading;
• to find out how families, particularly the most disadvantaged, respond to the pilot;
• to embed support for family reading as a strategic approach in the Derbyshire Partnership.

European Success Story

One of Derbyshire's intergenerational projects, co-ordinated by Read On - Write Away!, is being held up as a European success story. Grassmoor Allotment Project was selected as one of seven projects to be showcased in the guide of ideas for planning and implementing intergenerational projects: Together: yesterday, today and tomorrow. This publication is on the website of the European projects MATES (Mainstreaming Intergenerational Solidarity) and has been published in all 22 European languages. You can find it on the link below:

www.matesproject.eu

Buddy Plus+ volunteer mentoring project showcased at Westminster

Read On – Write Away's mentoring scheme which boosts young people’s confidence and skills and helps prevent offending has been showcased at the House of Commons.

The Buddy Plus+ volunteer mentoring project, run by Read On – Write Away! in partnership with the Derbyshire Youth Offending Service was one of several mentoring schemes invited by the Mentoring and Befriending Foundation, (www.mandbf.org.uk) to take part in a Celebrating Success day at the House of Commons on Thursday, 31st January. The Minister for Communities and Local Government, the Rt. Hon. Hazel Blears hosted the event.

The Buddy Plus+ project manager, Tony Faulkner, attended the Celebrating Success event along with a 15 year old boy who is currently being mentored on this project.

Tony commented, “It was a great opportunity for professionals running mentoring projects to share their success stories with M.P.s and find out how even more can be done to give young people the right backing so they channel their energies into positive activities and do not become involved in offending.”

Paul Holmes, MP for Chesterfield, who had a prior engagement at the time of Celebrating Success  event, caught up with Tony and the young person in his constituency office.  Tony talked to Paul about all the good work being done in the Chesterfield area by the Buddy Plus+ volunteer mentors and the benefits to the young people.