Kavita Choitram
Kavita has spent two weeks climbing Mount Kilamanjaro, Africa’s highest mountain, and instead of deservedly resting up in the evenings she came to the ReachOut! Academy and on her return was Supermentor, helping several mentees understand quadratic functions!
Good work Kavita!
Friday, 25 November 2011
Friday, 18 November 2011
ReachOut! Academy Volunteer of the Week - Georgie Simmonds
Georgie Simmonds
Not only because of the staying power (one of ReachOut!'s core values!) Georgie illustrated when her bag disintegrated due to the weight of her law notes, but because of her expertise in quadratic functions, managing to get masses of young people through the equations!
Georgie has been an amazing volunteer for ReachOut!, starting half way through last year’s project, she has built a great relationship with her mentee, who always makes a B-line for her in the mentoring sessions and who in fact often asks about Georgie on the weekends.
Well done and thanks Georgie!
Not only because of the staying power (one of ReachOut!'s core values!) Georgie illustrated when her bag disintegrated due to the weight of her law notes, but because of her expertise in quadratic functions, managing to get masses of young people through the equations!
Georgie has been an amazing volunteer for ReachOut!, starting half way through last year’s project, she has built a great relationship with her mentee, who always makes a B-line for her in the mentoring sessions and who in fact often asks about Georgie on the weekends.
Well done and thanks Georgie!
Y11s on the ReachOut! Academy
A couple of Y11s (preferring to remain anonymous) finished their work early at the ReachOut! Academy last night so I asked them to jot down a couple of lines about why they come to the project. As promised, I have posted their thoughts below…
“We are 15 year old students that go to The Petchey Academy. Our favourite sport is football. And we are very social.
We heard about the ReachOut! Academy as our friends told us about it. We come to play football but also they help us with out English and Maths work and homework.
We come to ReachOut! because it keeps us off the streets, most of our friends come and we enjoy playing football. They help us with work to help our grades which is amazing and it’s helped us a lot in school.”
Thanks to both of them for their comments!
“We are 15 year old students that go to The Petchey Academy. Our favourite sport is football. And we are very social.
We heard about the ReachOut! Academy as our friends told us about it. We come to play football but also they help us with out English and Maths work and homework.
We come to ReachOut! because it keeps us off the streets, most of our friends come and we enjoy playing football. They help us with work to help our grades which is amazing and it’s helped us a lot in school.”
Thanks to both of them for their comments!
Friday, 11 November 2011
ReachOut! Academy Volunteer of the Week - Mike Niles
Mike Niles
Mike ruptured the cruciate ligaments in his knee two weekends ago, he emailed me more concerned about missing the project than the state of his footballing career. He made an incredible, four legged-hobbling return to the project this Tuesday which reminded me of when Martin Keown played an entire football match and found out afterward that he’d fractured his ankle in the second half.
On a more serious note, Mike’s eagerness to return was due to the fact he had just started to work with a young man that really needs his support. They worked exceptionally well together on Tuesday and I’m delighted to see his mentee engaging when in the past he has been one of our hardest to reach young men.
Mike hobbling off on crutches after the project brought a tear to my eye.
A huge thanks to Mike for all his efforts.
Jack Bond
Mike ruptured the cruciate ligaments in his knee two weekends ago, he emailed me more concerned about missing the project than the state of his footballing career. He made an incredible, four legged-hobbling return to the project this Tuesday which reminded me of when Martin Keown played an entire football match and found out afterward that he’d fractured his ankle in the second half.
On a more serious note, Mike’s eagerness to return was due to the fact he had just started to work with a young man that really needs his support. They worked exceptionally well together on Tuesday and I’m delighted to see his mentee engaging when in the past he has been one of our hardest to reach young men.
Mike hobbling off on crutches after the project brought a tear to my eye.
A huge thanks to Mike for all his efforts.
Jack Bond
Thursday, 10 November 2011
Volunteer Profile: Sophie Richardson
Name: Sophie Richardson
Current occupation: QMSU President
ReachOut! history: Mentor, Cayley Primary School, 2007/08
Current occupation: QMSU President
ReachOut! history: Mentor, Cayley Primary School, 2007/08
“I found out about ReachOut! in my second year at Queen Mary through Provide Volunteering. I thought it sounded like a really great way to give something back to the local community and I had experience of working in schools and with young people that I wanted to build upon. I was placed in a primary school on Ocean Estate in Tower Hamlets and was a mentor for some of the girls in year 6. The other mentors in the team were volunteers from QM too and so it was a great way to meet other students.
We ran a two hour session once a week, the first hour being sports focussed (the girls we worked with were so competitive!) and the second hour being one-to-one mentoring. My mentee was a keen writer so we focussed on her literacy skills and later, on her numeracy skills. It was a great feeling knowing that I was able to help a young person develop and grow personally over the course of the year, particularly on the run-up to leaving her beloved primary school and moving on to the big world of secondary school!
I thoroughly enjoyed my time as a ReachOut! mentor and was quite sad to say bye to the girls I’d worked with at the end of the year. The experience will stay with me forever I’m sure and the opportunity to complete my OCN Mentoring qualification with ReachOut! was fantastic. The skills I learnt served me well on my Erasmus Year Abroad (a compulsory part of my French and Linguistics degree) as I ended up teaching 10 year olds in France.
One of the reasons I think students are so great as ReachOut! volunteers is because we are young and able to connect well with the pupils. More importantly though, I found that as a ReachOut! volunteer I was the first person the young people met who had been to university. Some of them hadn’t realised there was a university right across the road, let alone know someone who had been! So to be broadening their horizons and introducing them to the prospect of higher education was something I felt really quite proud of.”
We ran a two hour session once a week, the first hour being sports focussed (the girls we worked with were so competitive!) and the second hour being one-to-one mentoring. My mentee was a keen writer so we focussed on her literacy skills and later, on her numeracy skills. It was a great feeling knowing that I was able to help a young person develop and grow personally over the course of the year, particularly on the run-up to leaving her beloved primary school and moving on to the big world of secondary school!
I thoroughly enjoyed my time as a ReachOut! mentor and was quite sad to say bye to the girls I’d worked with at the end of the year. The experience will stay with me forever I’m sure and the opportunity to complete my OCN Mentoring qualification with ReachOut! was fantastic. The skills I learnt served me well on my Erasmus Year Abroad (a compulsory part of my French and Linguistics degree) as I ended up teaching 10 year olds in France.
One of the reasons I think students are so great as ReachOut! volunteers is because we are young and able to connect well with the pupils. More importantly though, I found that as a ReachOut! volunteer I was the first person the young people met who had been to university. Some of them hadn’t realised there was a university right across the road, let alone know someone who had been! So to be broadening their horizons and introducing them to the prospect of higher education was something I felt really quite proud of.”
Friday, 4 November 2011
Top Boy - oh so predictable, but realistic?
I was informed yesterday that as a charity worker aiming to help disadvantaged young people in Hackney I MUST watch the final episode of Channel 4’s Top Boy last night. With no time to catch up on previous episodes I whizzed through the video clips on the C4 website to get up to speed and the first thing that struck me was how much Ra'Nell and Gem, the unfortunate and gullible 13 year old school boys, reminded me of some of the children at the ReachOut! Academy - they looked like them, behaved like them and even talked like them – no one could fault the actors for being unrealistic.
The storyline was fairly predictable for a TV drama (Dushane, a disillusioned 20-something feels his only chance at a decent life is to deal drugs, he takes advantage of vulnerable teenagers, draws them into trouble, deal goes bad and someone gets shot) –that’s just good TV, but I'm not trying to belittle it. The stark reality is that young people in Hackney are exposed to gang culture, violence and drugs on a regular basis through the news, playground and estate gossip, older siblings and perhaps even directly themselves, with the scary effect that they have become desensitized to it all and perhaps even accepted it as just another part of life.
Perhaps for me, the saddest moment of the series was at the start, when Dushane convinces himself that he has no hope of a future that doesn’t involve crime. It echoed comments from some of our ReachOut! kids who often don't expect to do well at school, land a good (or any) job and struggle to see the point of working hard because it won’t change anything anyway; they’ve grown up in Hackney and feel that Hackney is what has determined their identity.
Top Boy should raise the question for all of us – how can we (yes you too) convince our young people that they can break the trends of unemployment and crime and not choose (yes, as they say in Dangerous Minds – you always have a choice) a life where violence and drugs are all too prevalent? What are we doing to help?
Drama and actors aside, Top Boy is a representation of a youth culture that has become famously associated with the area of Hackney. While we need to acknowledge the existence of such a culture, it is crucial that we address it too. Our work at ReachOut! strives to do just that….
Frances Blackwell
The storyline was fairly predictable for a TV drama (Dushane, a disillusioned 20-something feels his only chance at a decent life is to deal drugs, he takes advantage of vulnerable teenagers, draws them into trouble, deal goes bad and someone gets shot) –that’s just good TV, but I'm not trying to belittle it. The stark reality is that young people in Hackney are exposed to gang culture, violence and drugs on a regular basis through the news, playground and estate gossip, older siblings and perhaps even directly themselves, with the scary effect that they have become desensitized to it all and perhaps even accepted it as just another part of life.
Perhaps for me, the saddest moment of the series was at the start, when Dushane convinces himself that he has no hope of a future that doesn’t involve crime. It echoed comments from some of our ReachOut! kids who often don't expect to do well at school, land a good (or any) job and struggle to see the point of working hard because it won’t change anything anyway; they’ve grown up in Hackney and feel that Hackney is what has determined their identity.
Top Boy should raise the question for all of us – how can we (yes you too) convince our young people that they can break the trends of unemployment and crime and not choose (yes, as they say in Dangerous Minds – you always have a choice) a life where violence and drugs are all too prevalent? What are we doing to help?
Drama and actors aside, Top Boy is a representation of a youth culture that has become famously associated with the area of Hackney. While we need to acknowledge the existence of such a culture, it is crucial that we address it too. Our work at ReachOut! strives to do just that….
Frances Blackwell
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