A number of young people who attend the project are now moving onto some learning via the We Share Stuff qualifications route. It’s giving them a chance to go away from this project with a nationally recognised qualification which will be of great benefit should they move into further learning or employment. On the issue of employment, the recession is leaving it’s mark on Engage endeavours too. The building and retail sectors are seeing a decline in opportunities for job seekers. As more and more people are being made redundant, maybe now is the time to brush up on new skills. We hope that the skills being shared at Engage will be recognised by employers, alongside the qualifications, making our young people prime candidates for the jobs they apply for.
Still on the subject of job searching. The majority of Engage clients use the Job Centre Plus website when searching for jobs. However, it is not the most friendly of systems and does not rate well in comparison with many current online services. We were quite excited then, to hear about a new project that looks to amend many current governmental services to make them better. JobCentre ProPlus, simplifies the current system and allows information to be shared in numerous ways. We’re just looking into how we can incorporate this into the engage site so stay tuned for news very soon.
Finally, the Engage pages will soon have their own space and domain. We plan to move everything over in the next two weeks or so. This is great news and shows that the project is working and growing.

Just a quick round up of how the sessions have been progressing at the ENGAGE project. The blogging skills are definately on the increase with a number of young people using their own blogs to share anything from their fave music videos, to creating logos, to searching for jobs. We’re in the process of working towards a project podcast, which will include information about the project as well as other relative stuff for young people. Some of the young people are already working on some backing music or ‘beds’ (a segment of a song or any produced beat used to speak over as opposed to just speaking in silence) for the podcast. Keep an eye on the blog for the latest updates as things will probably be moving quite quickly from now on.

The Engage Project is going from strength to strength. And that’s down to the hard work everyone is putting in. The site is now starting to take shape-thank’s to We Share Stuff and the young people using it.

We have managed to gain brilliant support from a range of organisations and individuals to make sure that there is a bright future for the project. I’ve just got to tie up a few loose ends, but, It’s all coming together!

The project is starting to gain momentum.. just as the Christmas holidays kick in! typical! but nevertheless, there’s some good stuff happening and plans on how and what we want to do in the new year. Daz is really getting to grips with blogging. He started off using Tumblr, to gathering some videos and tunes that he liked. Today he moved onto using a wordpress blog which allows you to do so much more. Take a look at his blog where he’s been working on some graphics stuff using picnik – the ENGAGE project needs a logo and it looks like we’ve found our man for the job… Nathan, who starts an E2E project in the new year, got his hands on the flip recorder and did a video of Dean, talking about the ENGAGE project. Hopefully in the new year, we can look at giving Jess a few leads regarding her music.. Turns out she’s recorded stuff in the studio so we’re keen to get all that online and get it out there to a larger audience…who knows where these things can go! We also had a visit from the Dudley team, who came over to have a look at what’s been going on. Dean managed to sneak a quick interview with Sam from the Dudley team.

Plenty of things in the pipeline and of course, it will all get blogged here!

We continue to use Tumblr as a bookmarking tool. We’re gathering some favourite tunes and videos that we can use.