Charity awards: Winners 2009
Inspiration, innovation and reach.
Sarah Brown highlights the importance of the Guardian Charity Awards in difficult times, reports Alison Benjamin.
Aik Saath - Together as one
The words "aik saath" mean "together as one" in Hindi, Punjabi and Urdu.
They also embody the ethos of the charity, which believes in working together to challenge racism and prevent violence. Aik Saath was established in response to gang violence between young people from Asian backgrounds in Slough. The founders of this organisation believed that young people needed to lead the efforts to resolve this conflict. Over 10 years later young people are still leading Aik Saath's efforts to build peace. Their efforts are led by the peer training team, a group of highly skilled young volunteers aged 12-25. They train other young people in conflict resolution and anti-racism skills in a variety of settings, including schools and youth centres. The team also strengthen community cohesion in other ways, such as by organising events, including an annual film festival and exhibitions, and raise money for other charities through various fundraising activities.
aiksaath.com
Faith and Football
In partnership with local agencies and through trained volunteers, Faith and Football organises and runs evening community youth football programmes in deprived inner city areas of Portsmouth, Birmingham and Plymouth. The programme is set up for disadvantaged young people aged 7-13 years, irrespective of their ability or background. These groups provide encouragement and regular exercise within a disciplined environment with the aim of steering young people away from antisocial behaviour in an increasingly violent drugs and alcohol culture. They provide a platform to help youngsters reach their full potential while encouraging, valuing and challenging them, and in turn improve community cohesion.
faithandfootball.org.uk
InterAct Reading Service
InterAct Reading Service was set up with the express purpose of providing a live one-to-one reading service to people who have had a stroke. The aim is to speed stroke rehabilitation through mood improvement (post-stroke depression can severely affect stroke recovery) and neural stimulation. Although neurons are destroyed by stroke, this stimulation can help the brain to create new routes from A to B, a phenomenon known as "adaptive rewiring". Actors are used to deliver the service as they have the skills required to communicate with people whose lives have literally been turned upside-down by their stroke.
interactreading.org
Shannon Trust
Shannon Trust works with prisons to provide resources and support to enable serving prisoners to use the Toe By Toe Reading Plan to mentor poor readers and help them learn to read. It has a team of volunteer local representatives who are partnered with a prison to offer practical support and encouragement to the facilitator and the mentors. It also offers mentor training, certificates of achievement and all the manuals and resources needed to deliver Toe By Toe. Active in almost every prison in the UK, the trust continues to work with prisons to get the scheme fully embedded across the establishment, to quickly identify learners and mentors, and to reduce the stigma for adults with reading problems in order to encourage learning.
shannontrust.org.uk
The Comfrey Project
The Comfrey Project began in 2000 with a small group of asylum seekers on one Newcastle allotment site. Now it works with around 80 project users on three allotment sites across Tyneside. With the aim of promoting health and wellbeing among refugees and asylum seekers, it engages closely with local voluntary and statutory organisations, the local allotment associations and with other community garden projects to collaborate where possible. The Comfrey Project aims to reduce isolation, boredom and depression in the refugees and asylum seekers whom they work with, thus improving their mental health and general wellbeing and assisting them in being more confident to access UK services and facilities, enabling them to build more positive lives.
thecomfreyproject.org/