Local organisations give our Alumni a real boost!

Our ASSET Alumni group have been busy this term turning their Youth Social Action idea into reality with the help of some fantastic people and businesses from our local area.

On 25th February, in the Half Term, we had lots of visitors from local charities, businesses, councillors, trustees and governors, as well as ASSET staff, Suffolk police and the University of Suffolk.

They listened to the young group share their ideas, then gave ideas and advice, asked questions to further their idea, and then broke off into mentoring conversations. Our Alumni group really appreciated the time that people took to mentor and advise, as well as further offers to connect them to specialists in their organisations to help take their ideas forward.

In April, Sue Mahoney and Andrew Roy from Vertas followed up the February session by offering the group a day of workshops with staff from different departments in their organisation.

We went along to the Vertas offices in Ipswich on 4th April, and were given a tour of the building and a series of talks on running catering, sustainability, marketing and architecture and design. This has given the team a huge range of knowledge to now turn into a business plan that they can use to get their People Park concept off the ground.

We had a great afternoon - all the better for finishing with cake!

Our next steps over the first Summer half term are to follow up some of the other offers of support from our friends in February, pull together our business plan with the learning we took from our visit to Vertas, and in the May half term we will tour round some ASSET schools looking for a suitable site to trial some "pop-up" People Parks over the Summer holidays.

Thanks so much to everyone who has given up time to help us! We really appreciate the connections we made and support we got to bring this vision to life!