Latest posting from our Leicester colleagues at Warning Zone: As reported last month, a major piece of work has been the shooting of a new briefing film to be shown to visiting groups on their arrival at WZ. The film sets the scene for everything that follows during their two hour visit and was made possible by funding from the Wooden Spoon charity. Filming started on Saturday 27th July and continued in the following week. Poor weather on the Wednesday forced an extra day filming on Thursday when finally, the director/cameraman was able to call, “That’s a wrap”. Thanks all round to Nutmeg 3D, the adult actors, the chaperones, those providing locations but not least to our six leading cast members, former Year 6 pupils from Wolsey House Primary School, Beaumont Leys Lane in Leicester: they were great. The film will be ready for use at the start of the new school year. Warning Zone is supporting National Citizens Service programme this summer. Six hundred 16/17 year olds from Leicester, Leicestershire & Rutland will be participating. As part of this programme the youngsters need to volunteer in their local community to make a difference. We offered a WZ fundraising project. We obviously struck a chord as we were the first project to be chosen. Eleven young people have started working at WZ this week and are planning their activities under the guidance of Ben, our De Montfort Uni student intern (well, he’s the closest we have to a young person on our staff). Next week they put their plans into action; look out Leicester! Our Wednesday Open Day Drop-in events continue with people from a wide range of organisations and businesses visiting us to find out more about the charity, the centre and what they can do to help. Already these have opened up some interesting possibilities for partnerships and funding. Finally, our utmost sympathy goes out to the family and friends of 14 year old Hannah Smith of Lutterworth who took her own life last week, apparently after being subjected to online bullying and abusive comments. Internet safety is about so much more than “grooming” and we are actively seeking funding to develop a complete “stand-alone” resource at WZ that we can offer to schools either prior to or following their usual Year 6 visit. Whatever the politicians do or don’t do about cyber bullying and trolls, we need to equip young people to feel safe, confident and secure when online.
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Warning Zone is located on Frog Island in Leicester. Here is the latest edition of 'Blog on the Frog'.
The current academic year draws to a close with our last school in at Warning Zone on the 18th. June and July are always full-on with bookings and the volunteers that are available work their socks off. Many people take the opportunity to go away before the daft school holiday prices kick-in and this means it is often down to the wire when covering school visits. Well done and thanks to our volunteers who have managed to cover them all. People are always asking, “What do you do in the holidays? It must be really quiet.” WHAT? This is Warning Zone; there’s always something going on. July sees the start of a run of business open days with 500 invitations having gone out. Last month two short promotional films were shot using children from Wolsey House Primary School and we are now well into the planning for the filming of a new 5 minute briefing film to be shot later this month. We are again using children who will have just left Wolsey House as well as adult actors. The filming will take us out to several locations for a total of four days and the planning and logistics required are considerable. On the fundraising side, this month also sees two evening Osprey Cruises on Rutland Water with wine, canapés and hopefully some ospreys and good weather. To be honest, the rain never gets in the way of a good evening and this year has seen a record number of chicks hatch at Rutland so there should be plenty of hunting for fish suppers going on. Those of you going to the Market Bosworth Show on Sunday 7th should keep an eye out for Zoe, Rachel and Carl who are on the Warning Zone stand raising awareness of our work. Say hello and have a go at the beer goggles game. Finally, you may have heard interviews with Richard and Vimme on BBC Radio Leicester following a reported incident of youths trespassing on the railway in Leicester. This is a reminder that the summer holidays in particular offer plenty of opportunity for youngsters to either hurt themselves or get into trouble. Well this July there are another 7000+ eleven year olds out there who should be better prepared to look after themselves – thanks to Warning Zone. The past few weeks have been a busy time for The Project Team at RADAR - the new safety centre planned for Northern Ireland in 2014. Our last site unfortunately proved unsuitable. We’ve visited and considered more than 40 potential sites and have shortlisted them down to four. The Project Board is on June 26th and they will decide then what the preferred site will be. We are getting very excited about being able to ramp up our activities and get started on kitting out our new home.
We have also initiated a RADAR Communications Groups which is chaired by The Princes Trust and is made up of representatives from the Department of the Environment, the Northern Ireland Policing Board and the Project Team itself. An initial meeting has been held and we are currently devising a short marketing strategy and action plan. We have also done some initial exploration of options available to us to raise awareness of the RADAR centre. There will be lots of good things to announce shortly and we will keep you up to date through the News section of the website. Prepare for exciting news! Following a procurement exercise, we’ve just awarded the contract for the hosting and maintenance of our website to local company Vision Graphics. We are delighted that the contract went to a relatively new local company and we welcome Mark and his team on board and are looking forward to rebuilding the website to provide both desktop and mobile access. Sonia has been away from the office helping out elsewhere and we are delighted to have her back with us on a full time basis once again. John is also double jobbing at the moment and is helping our technical team delivering one of their projects. He’s as keen as ever and we know he hates every day he spends away from us! John has also secured our first RADAR sponsor and more news will follow on this shortly…. As a sneak preview for our readers we can tell you that it’s a very well know prestigious Northern Irish company! Paul’s back to full health after his emergency appendix operation…. ouch! He’s very appreciative of all the good wishes he received when he was laid up. Now that he’s back the Team remember how bad his jokes really are! Sandra is the newest member of the team and is still learning the ropes. So far we’ve learned her jokes are worse than Paul’s! If they don’t improve we might shame her by posting one of them next month! So that’s our update for this month, things are about to get pretty busy so we are looking forward to letting you know all about it next month! The Risk Factory is Scotland’s only interactive safety centre and has been operational since January 2007. Our core market focuses on the Primary 7 children of Edinburgh and the surrounding local authorities. As the school programme is now well established we have turned our attention to working with new markets.
As part of the school programme we welcome schools that work with children with additional and special needs including behavioural, emotional and supportive needs. We have now extended this to working with adults with additional needs. Our aim is to provide a session that will deal with some of the issues that adults with additional needs will have moving into a more independent living and lifestyle. Although these sessions are still mainly based on our core programme we can tailor the scenarios to meet the needs of the group through conducting a pre-visit with the group leader(s). The previsit allows the staff the opportunity to identify the needs of the group and discuss the most suitable scenarios and messages. It also allows the group leaders to visit the centre before bring along their groups. We ran a very successful pilot programme with a college from a neighbouring local authority and have now written to all colleges and organisations, within our catchment area, that work with adults with additional needs inviting them to take part in our new programme. Ann Thomson Manager, The Risk Factory 20 New Mart Road Edinburgh EH14 1RL 0131 455 8930 Interested in becoming a Risk Factory volunteer guide? Email riskfactory@edinburgh.gov.uk for more information. We have successfully bid for funds from the Welsh Assembly Government and Environment Agency Wales to support the development of an interactive exhibit at DangerPoint which will be used to educate people, primarily school children of between 8 and 11 years of age, on the dangers of floods and also how to prepare at home for a flood.
Several flood hazards are ranked as VERY HIGH on the North Wales Community Risk Register. Extending the remit of DangerPoint to incorporate the subject of flooding is a logical step to educate members of North Wales communities about flooding. The intended difference that the new flood exhibit will have on our visitors is:
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