Headline news

Our final day at school on Friday 17th December and what a year 2010 has been for our project. In our whole school assembly we received an award for the best mini-company and the head of enterprise explained what we had been doing this year to deserve the award. Always embarrassing to be stood in front of a 1,000 or so of your peers, but hopefully it will inspire others to believe in their ventures and not set limits on their expectations. There was an article in our local paper too - the Bournemouth Daily Echo, so we hope that will encourage more would be silver surfers to come along.

Documentary

Great that we are busy getting a FAB new image as we have been selected by the judges of the Community Champions Awards to be featured in a documentary to be screened in Spring 2011. The great think is that this could really help us to demonstrate how our model works and encourage others to adopt it in their community too.

Visit - www.community-champions.org - to find out more!

Heavenly Trip

Tuesday, 14th December was the date set for our trip to London to meet up with the kind folk of top branding agency - Heavenly. We were treated like any top, corporate clients and had the full branding process explained to us - plus coke, chocolate biscuits and cakes - who could want for more ;o). It was so impressive and we all started to think about brand identities in a different light. Of course it was particularly exciting to be thinking about the direction our project was heading and how this would impact on our new identity. Matt and Richard were so good at explaining all the stages we needed to work through and by the end we had a lot of concepts buzzing around in our heads. We plan to use the holidays now to consolidate all of this activity, then talk to our "students" to get their input too, before we go to the next step of sitting down with the designers and coming up with our brand toolkit! All too exciting for words really and how lucky do we feel to have the best in the business to work alongside. Heavenly indeed.

WOW We've been recognised by royalty

With only 7 days before the end of term, we were not yet expecting any surprise gifts but today Ms Loughnan told us that we had been recognised by the Princess Diana Awards. They highlight the work young people do to inspire others, so we were all really thrilled to be thought worthy of the award. It will be something special to share with our "older" students when we next meet because without them we would not be the project that we are.

Robin is our champion

We are really thrilled this week as we nominated one of our students to be Age UK Internet Champion 2011 - Robin is one our regular students and very enthusiastic - so when we heard he was on the short list, we couldn't have been more pleased. We hope Robin will become a leading light for his peers who might lack the knowledge or confidence to get online. The number of people over 65 using the Internet has increased from 18% in 2006 to 40% in 2010. Despite this there are still 6 million people aged 65+ who have never accessed the internet so if Robin gets the chance he will have a lot of people to convert!

Sir Bob mentions Internet Rangers

Great meeting with Sir Bob - he was quite intense but thankfully loved our idea - he had some advice for us and seemed really knowledgeable about social enterprise. Megan was asked to introduce him on the main stage to 2,500 delegates!!! She did a great job and even managed to get in a joke about the Christmas lights. If you want to listen to the full speech Sir Bob gave then check out the link below:-

https://www.ssatrust.org.uk/sites/NationalConference2010/abouttheevent/Pages/thursdaykeynotevideos.aspx

Very rock and roll day plus a late night but well worth the trip! Now able to say we have got on the global platform.