Week beginning 27th January

Not too much paper work type stuff going on this week as we have a fund raiser on Saturday so our young people are busy rehearsing. We take over a fantastic pub called 'The George' one of the oldest buildings on Portland for a Saturday afternoon, an annual event and one that usually packs out the pub (It's not that big) and is a really nice afternoon raising a few hundred much needed pounds to sustain our work.

We have agreed to meet on February 10th to discuss writing up  paper work relating to the tuck shop as many of the details are currently on scraps of paper work.

Social enterprise art project starts next week, with official launch on Monday 24th February. First project is to make mobile phone 'socks' using recycled material. I've no doubt our art leader and trainee have come up with a great idea and perhaps I can post some photos soon.

Book Keeping!

The enthusiasm of our young people is amazing and they are very protective of their tuck shop. The Portland Rocks steering group that runs the CIC took the decision to give them a budget of £20 to buy their first batch of stock and they are now brilliant at coming into the venue and getting set up. If you watched the video in the previous post you will see how quickly one of them moved when she thought someone might be helping themselves even if it was only a joke!

They do keep written notes of what they sell but it is a bit chaotic at the moment so we are now working to rationalise it all. The young people are all students at the Aldridge Academy on Portland and so have a chrome book which they can take home as well. Therefore we helped them set up a cash book in Google docs.which can be shared with myself and our volunteer book keeper so everything can be monitored. If you've never tried Google docs I do recommend it. Like most people I used Microsoft Office for most things but the Docs feature is a very powerful tool for collaborative working and quite intuitive.

We have recruited a parent volunteer who has offered to buy stock for the young people so long as they give him a list of what they need and the money to buy it from a local wholesaler. However, on Monday they told me they still have some stock to sell so looks like they will be arm twisting our attendees to buy things whether they want them or not!

Social enterprise art strand starts on 3rd February with official launch after the February half term so we have started publicising via Twitter and social media.

Week beginning 14th January 2014

Portland Rocks started again this week so time to get the tuck shop up and running again. Stock is a bit depleted but we have recruited a volunteer who has kindly offered to collect stock from a local wholesalers once the young people have identified what is selling well. Most conversations seem to revolve around Maoams at the moment! I plan to meet with the SEQ students next week so we can start to write up the paper work. The trouble with working with motivated musicians is getting them in one place. Four of the group have been helping our dance dept. at IPACA with their production of Fame Junior providing some live music in a show performed to backing tracks.

So what does a Portland Rocks session look like, well before Christmas I gave our young people a couple of cameras and told them to video a workshop session how they see it which I have since edited into a short film. This was a sharing session where the various groups play to each other.  Young people run their own rehearsals and pretty much all the material you here including the jazz numbers are originals. Lighting in the venue isn't great so it is a bit grainy but this is very much Portland Rocks in the raw!!!!

If you are wondering who I am, I'm the keyboard player in the jazz group, my main instruments are actually clarinet and piano. This group usually have a saxophonist but she was absent that night. They managed to film me looking suitably grumpy!

Well here goes, my own blog to write about my SEQ experiences working with a variety of learners on Portland and the surrounding area.

My first moderation experience was with a very mixed ability year 10 group at what was then Royal Manor Arts College on Portland now IPACA (Island of Portland Aldridge Academy); a group of around 10 students worked on the bronze course. What was exiting was seeing them plan an enterprise trying to raise funding for a cause they had decided on and cared about personally. I believe the enterprise element was important in motivating them and through the experience of delivering to them I now prefer to introduce the enterprise first so as to get young people hooked on something practical that they can take ownership of.

For enterprise purposes they decided to split into two groups and were tasked with setting up an enterprise on a budget of £20:

Group one created a set of five post cards of our local area and sold them to raise money for cancer research. They did everything including recruiting a fellow student not on the course to take the photos. The photos were then printed and sold making a profit of around £23 in a relatively short apace of time.

Group two spent some time trying out various ideas to raise money to donate to diabetes research including approaching the national society. In the end they exploited an opportunity that came their way because of the diamond jubilee. The school was hosting an afternoon of ‘wacky races’ and because it had been arranged at relatively short notice they needed someone to provide refreshments. The idea of selling jelly and ice cream to raise money for diabetes might seem strange but they certainly spotted a need as they made a profit of over £25 in around an hour selling their product at 25p for a plastic cup full. In the end they were just selling jelly as they ran out of ice cream.

They researched Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen restaurant and the Eden project among others as part of their work being two well known social enterprises relatively local to us. Whilst researching their favourite products I have to say I learnt loads about well known items and their production including mobile phones and music players, some of it was truly eye opening!

They were an interesting group to work with as I think it would be true to say they were a little bit wary of this ‘unknown’ course but they enjoyed organising their enterprise, learnt loads about taking responsibility for their  work, basic business organisation and in the end lessons were pleasant and quite social.