Told in pictures. I thought this was kinda neat.
Posts Tagged ‘sya’
What does Solent Youth Action do?
Monday, September 27th, 2010Charity auction for Comic Relief
Wednesday, March 11th, 2009
I generally try and avoid using my blog to ask for help for Solent Youth Action – the last time I remember doing it was back in 2007 when I was looking for mentors for our new mentoring scheme.
So I hope you’ll forgive me now if I try and use my space here to ask for support for an SYA event coming up.
If you are near Hursley next Monday (16th) afternoon, please come along to the Clubhouse at 2.30pm.
Young volunteers for SYA are refurbishing old furniture: restoring it, cleaning it, and decorating it. They hadn’t done anything like this before, so it has been a great opportunity to them to learn new, practical skills.
The furniture was all donated – these were items that otherwise would’ve been thrown away, making it also a good chance to teach a valuable reduce, reuse, recycle message.
The fruits of their labour will go on sale in a charity auction to be held in the Clubhouse, with all money received to be donated to Comic Relief.
Please come along and take a look at what they’ve been working on.
More details about the event, and the items of furniture that the young people are working on, can be found on the SYA website.
A year in SYA
Monday, August 11th, 2008After my post looking back at five years at IBM, time for another reflective look back.
This time: looking back at the last year’s work in Solent Youth Action. I’ve just had to write the Chair’s foreword for our Annual Report. Writing coherent English is never my strong suit, so I figure that as I spent a fair bit of time trying to write it I might as well reuse it in as many places as possible!
Another four day work week
Friday, April 25th, 2008This week was another chance to get away from my desk for a day.
Support U 2
Last Thursday, I spent the day in Hursley House running a careers training day for young people. The morning was spent on how to write CVs, and the afternoon focused on interview skills. It was a part of the current phase of my mentoring project, Support U 2. I’ve written about Support U 2 already (both before and after), which is why I didn’t post about last week at the time – although the project has continued to be been refined and improved, the aims and general ideal is still much the same as I’ve written before.
Still, the day was a big success – in particular a couple of hours in the afternoon where young people each received one-on-one interviews from IBMers. Each interview was about ten minutes long, after which they’d get feedback on their interview technique before moving on to an interview with another IBMer. Very tiring – for both the young people, and the volunteer interviewers! – but I think it went well. There was a noticeable improvement in the young people’s interviews as the afternoon went on.
(And a big thanks to Nick, James and Andy for being amongst the fantastic volunteer interviewers. There were several others – I’d link to them all, but couldn’t find them online anywhere… 🙂)
That was last week’s day away from my desk.
IBM HackDay 5
Today, I spent the day in Hursley House again! This time for our latest internal HackDay. (It seems that a lot of the cool things I do at work are happening in the House… it’s conditioning me in a Pavlov’s Dog kinda way to really like being in Hursley House! 🙂 )
Unfortunately, I got quite distracted by a few customer issues – my day job is a service role, responding to customer problems with our software. It seems that Friday is the day when a lot of customers will report problems that they’ve run into – I guess that if they’ve still not something working by Friday, then it’s time to call IBM Support!
Even if I spent a lot of time doing normal work, it was still fun to do it in the House, and get to talk in-person to a few people that I normally only communicate with through blogs or Twitter. And excuses aside, I did get a chance to write a small hack of my own, which I even managed to get working before heading home. I’ll have to post about it soon.
Looking at my diary, I’m gonna have to work every day next week. It’s so unfair…
Me & U
Wednesday, February 6th, 2008I don’t often blog about work that we do in Solent Youth Action. Not sure why. Perhaps because the best stuff we achieve isn’t normally something tangible I can pick up and show people.
But today it is – because today I got a proof copy of a booklet that we’ve produced that I wanted to share.
Me & U (“My Emotions Understood”) is a project we’ve been running with the Brookvale Youth Mental Health Team. The idea was to work with young people who have experienced mental health illnesses and support them to write a book of thoughts and poetry that could raise awareness of mental health issues. Through the production of the booklet, we supported the young people to try and explain the emotional experience of a young person with mental health issues.
They’ve managed to produce a stunning booklet that is as moving as it is informative. It’s an amazing achievement and, I think, very unique.
When I try and explain what “Solent Youth Action” does, people sometimes find that it isn’t what they might have first expected from a youth volunteering charity. I’ve blogged before that “volunteering” can take many forms, and this is another fantastic example.