Build Croydon – MakeAthon

Interaction between Technology companies and Primary/Secondary schools – bringing technology into the forefront through talks, demos, HTML, CSS, Code Club, Stop Motion Animation, Construction of a Computer, Creating a Website, Q&A and much more….

When: 16 June 2014
Times: 12:00 – 18:00
Theme: Technology showcase for young people
Format: Showcase
Venue: LNK unit Upper Mall Centrale Shopping Centre Croydon CR0 1TY

We’re all very excited at Lives Not Knives today – we’ve just heard back from the Mentoring and Befriending Foundation (click for their site).

Our Building Young Leaders mentoring programme has passed and is APS (Approved Provider Standard) approved.

This means that our mentoring programme meets the quality standard as assessed by M+BF.

Our website is currently under construction, but please feel free to continue to browse.

What is Horizons?

The Horizons Mentoring Project is a partnership between South London YMCA, Lives Not Knives and Association for Black Engineers. It is being funded by the Greater London Assembly through the Mayors Mentoring Programme. We are funded to work with at least 300 boys in Lambeth and Croydon and currently have funding until Dec 2014. The core aim of our project is to widen boy’s horizons so that they can see a much bigger picture of their future lives. Other outcomes include building self-esteem and self-confidence, with improved resilience and the ability to resist peer pressure, reduced entry to gangs and other offending behaviour. Increased attendance at school, and increased attainment.

As a result of attending the Financial Times Hackday through Croydon TechCity, Lives Not Knives was offered an opportunity to have a community stand at the Digital Summer Camp this year, held at the Hackney Community College.

When I first started volunteering with Lives Not Knives, I never thought that I would be hurtling out of an aeroplane towards the ground at somewhere around 120 miles per hour. Needless to say, working at LNK has certainly been a different experience to my previous work history.

I arrived at the Financial Times office bright and early. Well, perhaps not so bright (the weather was a little grey!) but certainly early enough. I was greeted, given a visitor’s badge, and without too much delay I was taken up to a conference room on the sixth floor. A number of tables had been set out for groups (and couldn’t be easily moved due to an awfully complicated web of cables along the floor), although many had already arrived and started discussing ideas. It turned out that I had a table all to myself. I was my own group. This wasn’t exactly ideal, so after a welcome speech from Rob Grimshaw (Head of FT.com) I was enveloped by the largest team in attendance – The Reel FT (Members of the Future Technologies team from Pearson).