The journey so far… continued
Written on 1-Mar-2009 by Maor Bar-Ziv
Right. Where did I leave you last time? Oh I remember. In early morning Oxford.
Give me a minute to get my head round to what happened since that morning while sitting in the basement of the UnLtd London office with Nick playing Nat King Cole and Jessica writing (hand-writing is not entirely a long lost practice) her first blog…
The website is up and running! And the server is fixed so I could actually continue spreading the word of our survey and stay in touch with our volunteers’ whereabouts. On that note, we now have 195 completed online surveys, approximately 30 completed interviews and 35 arranged.
I’m crossing all my fingers and toes that we’ll hit our targets, a lot can happen in 4 days!
Ok. Oxford. We met with the crew from the StudentHubs, also known as Oxford Hub. My understanding of their aim is to inform, inspire and connect students to opportunities to take action and contribute to making a better world. I suggest you check out their website www.oxfordhub.org if you want to find out more.
The StudentHubs’ biggest thing is the spectacular annual international development conference (OxFID) which they organise. Having discovered “social entrepreneurship; a whole new world!” their ambitious team wants to engage students by presenting an array of panels and workshops on social enterprise. While a lot of their work at StudentHubs has been organising volunteering, they hope to go beyond volunteering and generate “a cultural change in mindset”. The Oxford Forum for Social Enterprise hopes to be their first steps to making the change.
So, we came along and had a chat about what a conference for youth and social enterprise could look like. I can’t give away much, but the agenda looks really promising and dates have been set for May 9th and 10th. Keep these precious dates in your diary!
Meanwhile, we’re starting to get our interviews and focus groups transcribed and are planning 2 research workshops; one in London and another in Manchester. At these essential workshops we’ll be picking our volunteer’s beautiful brains on their experiences and thoughts on their fieldwork which will draw the initial map for the interim report. Exciting stuff.
What else? The next steps on our agenda is analysis (analysis and more analysis) and writing (writing and more writing).
Stay tuned!
Maor