PROPOSAL FOR DADS CONNECT

Dads Connect is social media site that will help establish Brighton & Hove as the world’s most father-friendly city. It will connect professionals, service providers and dads and their kids, both offline and online, in Brighton & Hove and beyond…………

WHAT IS A FATHER FRIENDLY CITY?

A father friendly city is a place where the actions of institutions, organisations and communities combine to transform the quantity and quality of fathers’ involvement in their children’s lives.

WHY WOULD A CITY WANT TO BE FATHER FRIENDLY?

The case for supporting greater father involvement is overwhelming. Research shows that involved fathers generally produce children who do better at school, have fewer behavioural problems are less likely to commit crime and more likely to escape poverty.
So improving the quality and quantity of dads’ involvement in their children’s lives is not only great for kids it will also benefit every community in our city.

It’s also great for mums who can benefit enormously from a more involved dad - which is why promoting shared parenting is highlighted as a priority in the Government’s equality strategy.

And it’s something that dads want with 82% of fathers saying they want to be more involved.

WHAT WOULD DADS CONNECT DO?

Dads Connect will provide three key services – information, interaction and inspiration.

For Dads, we would provide access to all the information they could ever need at every stage of fatherhood; spaces to interact with other dads and local ideas and opportunities to get actively involved with their children.

For service providers we would offer a platform to promote local activities and services and products for dads and their children.

For professionals working with fathers, we would provide space for them to interact with each other and also connect to and engage with fathers who they might not otherwise reach.

As well as connecting local dads, professionals and service providers, we’d would also aim to link to existing national and international resources and create a scalable service that could be easily replicated in other towns and cities.

WHO IS BEHIND DADS’ CONNECT?

The Dads Connect project would be run by The Men’s Network a community group which already provides services for men in Brighton & Hove including Dads’ Groups, 1-2-1 support for dads and social activities for dads and their families.

The Men’s Network is connected to a variety of public, private and third sector providers of services to Dads in Brighton & Hove. As the host of the annual National Conference for Men and Boys and the UK’s co-ordinator for International Men’s Day we are also connected to some of the leading providers of services to dads both nationally and internationally.

PROPOSED BUDGET: £5,000

CONTACT: Glen Poole, Strategic Director / 07981 334222 / glen@themensnetwork.org.uk

Brighton and Hove Chamber of Commerce want to do something to make it really easy for businesses to take on interns, apprentices and/or work experience people. I'm just going to call them interns now, but you'll know what I mean.
Many people, especially young people in the city leave uni or college with no experience of the world of work. Many businesses would like to take on interns, but are either unsure of how to do it, or are too caught up in running their business to get around to it. We want to make it easy for everyone.
Our idea is flipped around from the jobs boards which are currently available. We want to be able to get the young people who want to intern to put up their details, and help them to sell themselves and their aspirations for how they'd like to develop their new careers. We 'd then have an online catalogue of great people.
Businesses could then pick a handful of people to interview and choose the best.
Everyone wins - people without jobs get experience in the real world, training and something concrete to put on their cv. Businesses get an extra pair of hands. And we know that internships often turn into real jobs, so the city reduces unemployment and works towards that target of 6000 new jobs
Help us to develop the idea at the CityCamp weekend

Elev8Careers presents: 'E-Guidance'

Who we are
We are a group of qualified careers advisers with lots of experience in working with young people in formal and informal settings across Brighton, Hove and Sussex.

Our vision
We want to reach out to young people in community settings to support them on the journey of exploring and implementing their career goals. We want to encourage young people to empower themselves by taking responsibility for their own futures, and this includes reaching them outside of 'formal education'.

Brighton & Hove has seen drastic cuts to the Connexions service, which provided careers information, advice and guidance in schools. This means that for the last 12-18 months young people have not had the necessary impartial careers advice and guidance input to support them in making choices about Year 9, post-16 and post-18 options.

Added to this, in the current climate young people are faced with increasing levels of unemployment and higher university fees. They are not being effectively equipped with the skills to navigate their lives and livelihoods.

We are concerned about young people in mainstream schools and colleges, but also about a significant number of young people who are not attending school for a variety of reasons (travellers, young carers, home-educated).

What we want to do
We have developed an innovative yet simple, replicable and inclusive way of providing careers education, information, advice and guidance to young people. We want to offer the service to young people in informal settings in the community of Brighton and Hove. The service includes:
• E-Guidance (email and online chat for young people, parents/guardians and other interested parties such as teachers)
• A localised information portal of student questions along with the answers that can be accessed by all young people in the area
• A social media hub where young people and relevant educational and
employment providers can share knowledge.

We have piloted the E-Guidance part of the project at a Sussex school over a month (using basic email). This was very successful and we now want to roll out this service into the community.

Our project meets CityCamp's goals of increasing participation in the city, using new technologies, innovative practice, openly sharing results and creating new models of public service delivery.

We believe that participating in an online community – with strong roots
and connections with young people’s daily lives, their families, friends and neighbourhood - will also encourage the users to participate and contribute to their real life community.

How we will achieve it
In order to implement this project we need to:
• Market the service to young people where they spend time (schools, colleges, informal education providers, local community groups, activity centres etc)
• Buy in and adapt software to manage E-Guidance data (we have identified a potential program)
• Create Facebook, Twitter and blog accounts with a social media hub website
• Meet E-Guidance response need as required (we already have two qualified and experienced careers advisers and have access to a pool of interested advisers)
• Populate and moderate the social media hub. As it grows, young people and other relevant parties will also be able to contribute to this.

Initially we want to build the service through funding that covers start-up costs. Once the social media hubs are populated, updating will require minimum input. We plan to offer the service to local schools and colleges at a subsidised rate which will keep the E-Guidance service running for young people. The information portal and
social media hub will stay as open source for all local people.

To make our vision happen, we need lots of input and support from community organisations and IT professionals so please get in touch.

To produce a phone application that uses augmented reality to give Brighton users views of buildings that no longer exist, have been altered, or had a change of purpose and linking the images to oral and written historical accounts given by locals. The buildings will be tagged with stories and memories and will be part of an app that anyone can use for free. The app will have longevity within the community, as once the app is completed people will continue to be able to add to the information about different buildings by leaving their own written tags.

List of possible buildings of interest in Brighton:

The Hippodrome, Middle St. Opened 1900 – closed 1996
The Astoria, Gloucester Place 1933 – 1977 (those in their 80’s would remember its early days)
The Regency, 1920 – 1970s (those in their 80’s would remember its early days)
Hanningtons 1808 – 2001

Possible other buildings - but it may be difficult to find people to interview.

Brill Baths, DEMOLOSHIED 1929 (need to be 85+)
The SS Brighton 1934 –1965 (need to be 85+)

Another possibility may be to look at other smaller buildings and venues such as “coffee shops” from the 1960’s and/or
pubs.

The implications of what a large proportion of our unemployed young people, without experience, skills and motivation gained in their formative years will have on our city and future society is something undeniably dire. It is something we must address with all the immediacy and resources that we can.

We propose the formation of a social enterprise which manages a range of self sustaining community employment projects to help young people who are not in employment, training or education to learn how to learn, how to be inspired in their communities and create those 6000+ employable people who know what they are good at.

The projects would also be open to older unemployed and employed people who are looking to share their experiences, find their own calling and mentor our youth. This would be especially open to single mums and the elders in our communities who will gain from the sense of purpose and mentorship possibilities available from such collaborative projects.

We would like to use the Saturday CityCamp experience to explore the first collaborative project idea which can give life to this hub.
One proposal includes starting with a collaborative renovation project of an empty council space which can then be used as a community hub to house the next series of self sustaining community enterprises. The hub can also be used to host some of the other brilliant projects proposed in CityCamp 2012 already.

By nurturing the individual learning needs of our youth and collaborating with the vast pool of talent and creativity in our amazing city, we can create a hub from which ongoing self sustaining projects can be born.

Not for profit yet Profitable arts, technology and entrepreneurial projects and events would be encouraged to keep the hub self sustaining and provide our community with solid community businesses within which to learn and grow other ideas from. The funding would be needed to start project and create the umbrella organisation so that the collaborative spark we experience at CityCamp can become established as one of the city’s vital civic creative spaces.

Craft City Brighton
Britain’s craftiest city- celebrating Brighton and Hove as the first Craft City.
This plan uses social media and PR to promote the huge number of contemporary craft-makers and retailers in Brighton and Hove to make it THE destination for craft lovers.
Craft is highly fashionable in a retail world tired of High Street homogeneity. Brighton is known for its vibrant, exciting independent shops and culture. We can boost tourism and the local economy by highlighting the exciting, unique, original products being produced and sold in the city.
What is it?
• A website
• An app.
• A social media network
• Online shop
• City-wide support network
• Training and education opportunity

What: physical community-owned street A-Boards that only show good news or events in the local area.

Why: Everyday, across the city, thousands of people start their day by traipsing past newspaper A-Boards thrusting news of car crashes, sexual assaults and other misery into their faces.

What if we could give A-Boards to people for good news and reasons to be cheerful (not so much 'Jesus Loves You', more 'Free yoga classes in Hanover next Tuesday' or 'Grant given to fund sports club')?

How: It's simple, it's cheap, but it would require finding the right people (existing community groups?) to keep it up, and making sure we're not blocking the pavement or causing other hazards.

I can't put this into action for CityCamp, but I wanted to see what other people thought or if someone else wanted to take it forward.

Our kids are digital natives. My 8 year old can't remember when I didn't have an iphone, the four year old can't conceive of life without an ipad. But what are they learning about the digital world?

What they want is what they need... a digital natives afterschool club
+ digital natives need to be digital creatives not just digital consumers
+ digital natives need to play safe but be positive about taking risks
+ digital natives need help from people who understand technology AND creativity
+ digital natives will be building the things we will need before we even know we need them

Afterschool clubs are the perfect route into their lives - the cusp beween the education system - with its well-documented struggles with ICT education - and the real world of games, music, movies and fun

Our idea about how to build these clubs is simple but could only have been hatched in Brighton, a ground-up initiative that uses open source learning tools to harness the skills and goodwill of the creative and digital community in the city.

We have started by talking to the headteacher at our kids' school about the idea. Not surprisingly he said 'yes yes yes'. We are members of our PTA, we have talked to the wonderful people who run the Afterschool clubs we already use. We know that this idea will be be planted in fertile ground and can be grown and take root in ways which we cannot even conceive, but it must come from outside the system and be sustainable outside the confines of the school's resources.

We can be agents of change - we have a chance to build something that can transform the learning of the digital natives in our city.

Now we need what every start up needs. We need to focus our efforts on a pilot phase, learn from what has been tried before, give the kids the space to dictate the best ways to learn, build a network of talented people to offer their time and energy, grow an organisation that can use the power of digital to scale up and reach out to every digital native in every school.

So, we need all that CityCamp and Brighton is good for in terms of people, ideas, connections and expertise. And we need that money.

The Food Partnership's idea is an online tool for gauging interest in training courses/ talks/ workshops. Lots of groups in the city offer these but bookings are far from guaranteed and finding a suitable pricing structure to cover costs while being inclusive is very tricky. So we would like to see an online tool developed which allows people to register their interest in a course/ talk topic and how much they'd be willing to pay, then if enough other people sign up or sufficient funds are offered, the course can go ahead, perhaps with a doodle-style poll on dates. We think this could be used by lots of groups in the city and would also benefit from being a central portal for publicising courses and events of all types! What do you think City Campers??

There's been a fair bit of debate around the recent B&H budget. Can we make the outcome more transparent and understandable for everyone in the city? Possible list of questions would include:

1. What uses do/could different groups use the budget data for?
2. What data is/could be available - from the B&H budget, other B&H data, and maybe other city's budget data?
3. How can we use #2 to achieve #1?
4. More generally, how could we develop a solution which could be used for other similar goals?

In short, what do you want to do with budget figures that is difficult to do at the moment?

As we snuggle into the 21st century, we are expressing more and more dissatisfaction with our politicians and political system. Fewer people are voting and there is a feeling that the major parties have gone from representing us, to representing themselves. They come up with policies to try to capture voters, rather than having a solid core of beliefs by which they can be identified and as a consequence it becomes harder to tell them apart. Despite a small amount of reform, the Upper House continues to be even less representative of our nation consisting of old politicians, bishops, and the wealthy.

Yet on the other hand, people are finding that they can achieve a certain degree of influence by the "crowd sourcing" effect that the internet has enabled - think Avaaz and 38 Degrees. The internet has also enabled people to get directly involved in getting things done at a local level, rather than waiting for politicians to create policies to make things happen. There is now a wealth of web sites and apps enabling the public to tale part in everything from pot hole reporting to compost recycling. The one thing that hasn't existed until now is the "glue" that joins all these great ideas together. Welcome to the House of Games.

The House of Games is a ground up organisation that promotes and facilitates all the charitable work that people are already doing on a local level, and rewards them for it. Unlike an OBE, anyone can get a "gong" and it is not dependent on the whim of a politician approving it. If you do specific and measurable tasks, you will get the awards. Furthermore, gaining awards at "level 1" qualifies you to become active at "level 2." Think of it as starting at street level and working your way up to neighbourhood level. And you've already guessed at what I am going to say - the tiered approach goes on upwards at town, county, region and national levels. Higher levels coordinate what is happening at lower tiers, and are able to issue challenges and share best practises. Examples of challenges at local levels may be new or could exist already. They could be:

Neighbourhood watch
Running a book club/extending library service
Helping solve the problems of digital exclusion (e.g. for the elderly)
Improving parks and green areas beaches
Working with local school
Using your professional knowledge in a local way
Compost recycling
Excess fruit and produce re-distribution

There are many advantages to this approach.

You always start at the lowest level and so get experience on your way up.
You can start to participate at any age.
It is all about doing thing rather than talking about them.
You can move up the ladder, but you can also go down too.
Good ideas can be developed in one area, and shared with others.
Good ideas can be initiated at street level, or passed down from higher up.

Mighty oaks from acorns grow - there is no better example of this than the House of Games, and there is no better place to get it going than in Brighton. I am hoping to develop this idea during the course of the CityCamp weekend. Anyone interested?

Local & national statistics show the continued underachievement at school of pupils of particular ethnic groups, in particular Black boys. Locally, we are aware of racist bullying incidents in schools that are reported officially (2009/10 schools report: 307 incidents) as well as others that go unreported (anecdotal evidence collected by MOSAIC and BMEYPP). MOSAIC members do not want their children to become another negative statistic. Parents approach us for help with schools and often feel that they do not know enough about the education system and do not know how to support their children.

We know that the transition into school and between primary and secondary school is crucial in a child’s educational journey and experience. And given the above data, that BME children and young people are disproportionately more likely to have a bad transition experience.

MOSAIC will focus on the transition into primary school and BMEYPP will focus on the transition between schools. Both organisations will work together to:
€ Create videos of children and young people sharing their experiences of transitions into and between schools
€ Create Q&As/tips videos and resources about transition issues e.g. what you need for school, where to go for help, how to prepare
€ Create You Tube channel targeted at BME parents/carers, children and young people
€ Create a Facebook promotional page for parents/carers: links and updates
€ Create online promotions of success stories of BME children and young people in schools
€ Create online space for progress and experiences to be shared between parents e.g. twitter, forum, email updates
€ Run workshops with parents/carers, children and young people on their concerns at the beginning of the project and workshops to review their experiences at the end of the project
€ Links to MOSAIC & BMEYPP websites
€ Establish effective monitoring and evaluating systems to capture concerns/issues around transition and schools

Brighton has the second highest suicide rate in England. The highest is Blackpool.

Risk factors for suicide include mental illness, substance misuse, unemployment and poor social support networks. Brighton deals with high levels of these risk factors. The city also has a large LGBT population who have been shown to have a higher than average level of mental health problems, thoughts of suicide and attempted/completed suicide.

Support for people at risk of suicide is not always easy to access. Many people may be at risk but have little idea what support there is or how to access it.

As well as telephone helplines and web resources, the link would give people an option to click on online suicide prevention resources such as chat rooms and user forums that are moderated or staffed.

These stickers could then be placed on the back of toilet doors, on beermats, paper coffee cups – anywhere that permission could be gained.

We could target LGBT service providers, pubs and clubs with LGBT-specific information. MindOut will partner with us in producing relevant information and helping us distribute stickers.