Our New Year's Resolution

Our New Year’s Resolution as an organisation is to listen to our stakeholders more.

To be a charity which is always developing and improving, we need constructive criticism from across our organisation. This means making sure that we take the time to discuss ReachOut’s work with everyone who is involved with us, no matter what their level of involvement. From young people on our projects to their parents to our wonderful volunteers, we want to gather as much feedback as possible from all of our stakeholders.

We want to know what they like about ReachOut. We want to know how they think we could improve our services. We want to know what they think we could do to encourage more people to volunteer with us. We want to know what they think we should prioritise – expanding our services or improving our existing operations?

In order to do this, we plan to do a range of different things, including:

• Organising ReachOut’s first ever Volunteer Steering Committee – made up of both current and former volunteer mentors, this committee will not just offer ReachOut constructive criticism on our services, but act as a mini Board of Advisors whom we will consult about our major decisions and plans for 2014.
• Organising ReachOut’s first ever Young People’s Steering Committee – made up of both current and former mentees, this committee of young people will give us feedback and advice on how we can make ReachOut’s mentoring projects better for them and their peers.
• Increasing the number of feedback sessions with mentors on individual projects.
• Introducing feedback questionnaires for our young people.
• Making sure that all feedback, both positive and negative, is communicated back to the organisation.

Mentor and Mentee and the ReachOut Academy

We know that there will be a huge demand for ReachOut’s mentoring services in 2014. Therefore, in order to develop and improve in a way that will allow us to meet this demand, it is vital that we make good of our resolution to involve as many of our stakeholders as possible in our plans for the year ahead.

Here’s to 2014!

Meet our new London Academy Project Officer

As we say goodbye to Ewan, we welcome Chloe Holness who has just joined our team at the London office as the new Academy Project Officer!

Hi Guys!

When I saw the Academy Project Officer role advertised my initial thought was ‘this is the perfect job for me’! I feel that I’ve joined ReachOut, and specifically the London Academy programme, at an exciting time and I’m looking forward to getting stuck in. This week, I met all the Academy mentors and mentees and we all participated in a ‘silent debate’, yes, it actually worked! I was so impressed with the behaviour and enthusiasm for the activity from the young people. See below for one of the most well-articulated arguments from the week’s projects.

I have some teaching experience and have also worked for a literacy and mentoring charity in Peckham, south London. I am eager to get involved with the football coaching on the Academy programme having gained my level 1 football coaching certificate a few years back and playing for the University of Sussex women’s football team for two years. In case you were wondering, I support Arsenal :).

Hope to see you all soon!

Chloe

Chloe in the ReachOut office

Expressing his opinion on the controversial statement: ‘Men are inherently better than women’, Francis Nwofor (year 8) from Petchey Academy argued, “I strongly disagree with this because it is extremely sexist. Women generally have the same attributes as men, there is no tearing them apart based on gender. It is extremely wrong and just plain based on the dominance of one gender”.