Craig Macdonald Memorial Award

What winning the Digital Leaders Craig Macdonald Memorial Award has meant for us and the community we serve.

It's another time for recognising the hard work that grassroots organisations does for their communities. I can not help reflecting on the huge impact of winning this national award on Knowledge Pool and the Doncaster community.

 

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Digital Leaders Award 

Digital Leaders announced the launch of the Craig Macdonald Memorial Prize on the 6th of July 2021. This award was to recognise the best grassroots organisation working in their local community to help close the digital divides.

 
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The Impact of Winning the Digital Leaders Craig Macdonald Memorial Award on Knowledge Pool and the Doncaster Community 

I remember years ago for several weeks I sacrificed my annual leave and lunchtimes to get out into the community to train people. The reason for doing this is because I couldn’t afford to cut off my hours from work nor could I close my eyes to the needs of the people in my community. I created Knowledge Pool from my home with just only one personal laptop. The goal then was to support the people in my church in admin roles that need to upgrade their digital competencies. It was meant to be a sacrifice of one hour per week on a Sunday evening. But looking back now and seeing all the amazing things we have achieved through the support we have received especially from winning the Digital Leaders Craig MacDonald memorial awards I cannot but be proud and thank God.

The digital Leaders award saw over 700 nominations nationwide with over 20,000 votes. I was amazed to receive notification of making it to the top 3. The implication of this was that we were closer to clinching the prize but also had to face the task of an interview to justify why we should be the winner. That was my first encounter with Rob Wilmot. I will later discover he is a great innovator with a great passion for bridging the digital divide in the community.

On the night of the award, my prize was to attend such a prestigious event, although in my mind it would be really great to win it but with the competition we had, I didn’t think we got a chance. We were in the same category with some very strong well-coordinated and managed organisations that had done great things in their communities and were better known nationwide. But by some miracle, we emerged the winner on the night. The inaugural prestigious Digital Leaders award for the grassroots organisation supporting their community to bridge the digital divide went to Knowledge Pool. The award came with a prize of £5000

What does this mean for us?

Validation of the good works we have been doing

It created a lot of publicity for us

The news was shared nationwide

We’ve recruited 6 professional volunteers since winning (people are more interested in collaborating with us)

The prize from the award was an unrestricted fund. Most of the grants we receive are usually tied to delivering training or purchasing equipment. We rarely get funds that allow us to spend it on things that are outside the conditions of the specified grant e.g. buying digital devices for our learners, paying the salary of staff, enhancing the performance of our organisation etc.

We divided the use prize money into 4 parts.

1st part

Digital equipment for learners e.g. tablets and laptops.

2nd Part

Enhancing the performance of our organisation e.g. website upgrade; this is to improve the users experience and journey on our website. Our current website was jointly created by me and a colleague in 2019 with a budget of less than £500 (1 year of hosting inclusive). We have created a new website about to be published that will enable better navigation and interactions for our users.

Learners Management System:

We’ve been working on creating a learner’s management system to deliver better training, especially for learners with enough skill to self serve and interact better online. The concept behind this is to make our training resources available 24 hours and support more people with or without a tutor’s intervention. We kicked off the project with the support we received from Lloyds banking group in 2020 but towards the end of last year 2022 Rob added another 5000 to our grant money which made the dream of our LMS a reality. In March 2022 we paid for a subscription of the 40 learners account and currently uploading training materials to our customised account on Talents LMS. This system will help us manage our training, capture learners’ progress, process data analytics better, and improve the training.  This pilot with Talent LMS is expected to improve our performance and serve as a source of resources that will feed into our App (which is our next project for 2023)

3rd part - Delivering Trainings

Smart Buddies

Smart buddies is a digital capability project introduced by Knowledge Pool to meet the needs of the community. Digital exclusion is a big issue, especially among the difficult to reach people in the community. According to the Lloyds Bank Consumer Digital Index report, in 2018, 11.3 million people in the UK (21%) lack the full basic digital skills. 4.3 million (8%) have no basic digital skills at all, 5.4 million working adults (10%) are without basic digital skills. People with a registered disability are 4 times as likely to be offline; 28% of those aged 60+ are offline.

The advent of the Covid-19 pandemic created an upsurge in the use of the internet and digital devices. There are 38,994 (13.1 %) people in Doncaster aged over 64 years old. 1 in 10 of the population in Doncaster are aged 65+ Majority of the elderly are digitally disadvantaged. These and the result of several consultations we’ve made with community leaders are other charities led us to create a channel of supporting the community in improving the digital competency of the people.

Our pilot program kicked-off with Age UK in December 2020 and had seen a group of nervous digital novices transformed into progressive, confident and keen learners. Learners have been building their knowledge and digital skills by attending the weekly class and practicing what they've learnt.

Our learners whose average age is 70 can create and share files, download applications and interact with them. They can identify signs of online scams and threats. They are aware of safety steps (password services, anti-viruses, reporting of phishing emails, blocking unwanted contacts, etc) involved in protecting themselves and their devices. Apart from their technical knowledge they have formed a very strong bond augmented by the use of digital tool (WhatsApp group) through which they interact in and outside of classes. 100% agreed that the training had reduced their loneliness and improved their confidence.

The prize money we received from the Craig Macdonald award and other grant provider had supported us in scaling up the impact of this initiative we are hopeful that we will be able to support this project for the next 12 months.

To kickstart the next stage of this project we have recruited a volunteer manager, who will recruit 20 community volunteers to help us run the digital clubs in various areas in Doncaster. We are looking for community champions or local leaders who are passionate about supporting others.

Because of the unrestricted nature of the prize we received from the Craig Macdonald award we were able to give digital devices to people that needs it in our community. There is a case study that always touches my heart. We got a referral from a social prescriber for a lady with mental health issue who couldn’t receive any support from her health team because she had no digital device to join online meetings on Microsoft Teams during the pandemic. I delivered the device to her myself with a very heavy heart as I saw a vulnerable woman fighting for herself and her family with very little support from the community.

Digital Training at Changing Lives Doncaster

Changing Lives is an organisation to supports vulnerable women who have been through challenging situations get back on their feet. I love training at Changing Lives because it is a vibrant multi-cultural resources centre that operates in the heart of the city. I have trained in a class so diverse we had 10 countries represented in the same class. It was very exciting for me when I got the opportunity to train again in 2022 in Changing Lives due to the support we’ve received from the Craig Macdonald Digital Leaders award.

4th Part

Creating Digital Guide Books

Prior to winning the award we have created two digital guide books; Getting started with digital devices and getting started with online meetings. We started the creation of the third one ; getting started with digital tablets for the elderly during the first quarter of this year. This was done as a result of the experience we had in training elderly people on how to use digital devices. We realised that they had no experience with the look and feel of smart devices and had to explain the interactive nature of these devices to them. We also realised that memory loss was a big issue and had to devise a means of retaining what they’ve learnt. This guidebook will be published in June 2022.

The prize that keeps yielding

The Craig Macdonald memorial award has proved to be a prize that kept yielding for us as the support we received from Rob Wilmot who is a patriotic citizen of Doncaster is invaluable. He has supported us beyond the night of the award. His experience in the digital world and sphere of influence has greatly boosted our efforts and profile. Rob wanted to give the award to a worthy winner. We happened to be the one and the cherry on that cake is we are also a Donny citizen and proud to put our community on the map for great achievements.

I am extremely grateful for this opportunity and wish all the applicants for this year’s Digital Leaders award the very best of luck.

Thank you.

Yetunde Elebuibon

Director

Knowledge Pool

 

New Hall Bawtry DN10 6PU
07427262448

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