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Thursday Nov 20, 2008
Skills London
The team's just come back from the first day of Skills London, a careers fair for 14 to 19-year-olds at the ExCeL centre. This is our third Skills event since September – and we've had stands for TheSite.org and the Life Choices consortium at each of them.On TheSite.org stand, we've got a laptop with the website on show. We're handing out postcards and taking orders from schools and colleges. We're telling young people about the Respect? campaign and getting them to sign our pledge. With each event I'm getting better at describing what TheSite.org in a couple of sentences. Forget 15 minutes of fame – here we've got 15 seconds to attract someone's attention or they'll move onto the next stand.
The Life Choices consortium stand allows us to get young people's thoughts on this exciting new project, which has been funded by The Vodafone Foundation and v. We've got two panels on the back wall. One says, 'What life choices do you need to make this year?'; the other says 'What would make these choices easier?' Visitors write their answers on post-it notes and stick them on the wall. They can also use do-it.org.uk to sign up to be a volunteer as a website or marketing adviser or a content creator for the new website.
Fiona, Rosie and Kuljeet on the Life Choices consortium stand this morning
With each event, I'm getting better at judging how many bags of sweets we'll need for a day, how many pens we'll lose, how long it'll take me to set up the laptops. You'd think after a while I'd get a bit blasé. But the great thing about a live event is speaking to so many different people – some of whom have heard about us before, some of whom are learning about TheSite.org and YouthNet for the first time. It's totally exhausting, but somehow it's also energising and inspiring as well.
We'll be on stand E54 at Skills London from 9.30am-3.00pm tomorrow and 10.00am-4.00pm on Saturday if anyone out there in the blogosphere wants to come by and say hello.
Posted by Natasha Judd ( 5:33 PM ) Link to this post Comments[0]
