We recently received this great news from Sports Challenge:

 

Thanks to your support, three north-east charities which focus on supporting people in achieving their goals in life will also benefit from Sportschallenge 2014.

In addition to Maggie’s Aberdeen and Children’s Aid, we are giving our backing to Choices Aberdeen, Aberdeen Cyrenians and Mental Health Aberdeen (MHA), which will receive a share of funds raised.

Last year’s Sportschallenge raised more than £100,000 for deserving charities and with a record number of competitors signed up, we hope that this year’s sell-out event will surpass that record.

Nick Dalgarno, managing director at Simmons, said: “Every year Sportschallenge gives us the chance to give something back to the community through support for deserving local charities. With so many nominations being submitted, it has been a difficult task landing on this year’s beneficiaries.  Those chosen have all met our criteria of being small, local and lacking in significant corporate profiling.  Aside from a five number donation, the real benefit of being associated with Sportschallenge is the opportunity to be front and centre at an evening attended by over 700 professionals.

“The money raised will make a real difference to people in the north-east, going directly to charities which provide much-needed support and care.

“With support from our Gold Sponsors CNR, Viking SeaTech and Derrick Offshore, Simmons has hosted this event for three years, and it keeps getting bigger and better.  Sportschallenge is something that we are immensely proud to be a part of and we are all looking forward to raising substantial funds to help these important local causes.”

Choices Aberdeen promotes positive relationships; supporting and empowering people in making choices which will enhance their physical and emotional wellbeing. It offers support to youth groups and young mothers.

Linsey Revell, youth counselling manager and acting centre manager of Choices Aberdeen, explains that on a relatively small budget the charity does a lot of work valued not only by the young people they work with, but also by staff in schools and other services they work with.

She said: “We are delighted to have been selected by Sportschallenge. Choices Aberdeen is passionate about promoting and supporting positive relationships and the additional funding will allow us to extend the education and intervention work we do in schools and with other youth projects in the city.”

We have a couple of very exciting job opportunities here at Choices, please see the images below for all the details!

 

Recently a couple of our Youth Development Workers had the opportunity to attend a youthwork conference with a difference. At Choices we want to always offer the highest quality services that we can. We love to dig ourselves deep into current research so you’ll often see us at conferences and courses; from attachment and bereavement to YOLO and xenophobia we want to understand our young people and the tools and capacities we need to assist them.
The Youthwork Summit (YWS) is a large scale one day conference where speakers – whether experts in their fields or youth workers doing unique work – are given 10 or 15 minutes to address a particular aspect of youthwork. This focused approach encourages a higher quality of presentation, brings to the surface information which is relevant to the whole audience and allows for a plethora of speakers. Accompanied by a handpicked selection of youthwork organisations and NGOs in the stalls, the summit offered real inspiration from and for those working with young people as well as opportunities for networking.
In the same way that we want to help young people understand their relationships we want you to understand young people. Check out one speaker – Meg Cannon who has recently launched TheKokostory.com an online positive-discovery project for girls – as she tells the stories teenage girls living around us.

 

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Grace, Andrew and myself (Rhona) attended the Annual Children’s Mental Health Conference in Glasgow on the 28th May.

I think we all came away inspired by the speakers who were mostly passionate about their area.  The whole day was fast paced and Jim Taylor did a fabulous job of ensuring everybody kept to their allotted time.

 

A highlight and a good start to the conference was singing Ali Bali Bee with Tam Baillie Scotland’s Commissioner for Children and Young People.  Rest assured this was not a duet  but a reminder of a song we probably learned in our early years  “sitting on our Mammies knee”!  He emphasised how crucially important the early years are for determining Children’s mental health and wellbeing throughout their years.  Mr Baillie believes the scottish attitude towards Children and young people is changing although may still have a way to go.  He covered this with the following points –

• Children need love!
• Children need secure attached relationships
• Children need boundaries and balance especially within social media
• Encourage healthy eating
• Routinisation of  children’s sleep patterns
• The importance of play

Other speakers included –

Dr Helen Minnis, Senior Lecturer in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the university of Glasgow. Her research focus has been on Reactive Attachment Disorder. Dr Minnis spoke on Understanding Complexity in Maltreated Children with Psychiatric Problems, and why only some maltreated Children have mental health problems.

She got us thinking about dandelions and orchids! Dandelions will grow anywhere, whereas orchids need a lot of attention and looking after!

 

Martin Donnelly, a Nurse Specialist from Yorkhill Hospital spoke on how we can support CYP who self harm!

Dr Claire Stubbs, Counselling Psychologist and Psychotherapist talked about building resilience in a Technological Age.

Bill Colley, The UK ADHD Partnership, covered latest developments in our understanding of ADHD

Jan Melia, Outreach and development worker with crewe2000, looked at CYP’s relationship with Drugs and Alcohol

Steve Sweeney, Director of Bereavement Sector Support Scotland, Containing Trauma, Bereavement and Loss

Finally we heard from John J Reilly, Professor of Physical Activity and Public Health Science.  John addressed the extent to which exercise might improve educational attainment, mental health, and wellbeing, in children and adolescents.

 

All these presentations can be heard online for the next month by following these instructions.

Speakers’ Presentations: You will be able to view speakers’ presentations on
our website  <http://www.medicacpd.com/> www.medicacpd.com Please enter the
login. (Top right on the homepage)
Username: sh14@medicacpd.com  Password: medicacpd

Rhona (our new Youth Counsellor) and Linsey have recently spent the weekend in Dunfermline at brilliant and inspiring Play Therapy training.  The training is with Children Matters and this weekend was the second of three.  They are experiencing it to be very high quality.  They are pretty exhausted at the end of the weekend, possibly due to the fact that as well as looking at attachment from a theoretical perspective they are also having to examine their own attachment processes now and as children! Tough going at times! They are spending much of the weekend up to our elbows in playdough, paints and tapping into their inner thesps to do some drama work- all very creative and with amazing results.  They both think this training will be really beneficial in their work with young people and are looking forward to the next, and sadlly final weekend of training at the end of June.

Up on the hill sits Northfield Academy, a school whose motto is ‘Learn to live well’. Myself and a group of committed volunteers aim to contribute to the fulfillment of this school motto by running a lads drop-in on Wednesday lunchtimes. By taking some time to interact and respect these young people we hope to be positive role models and listening ears for them, and what better way to do this than playing football and FIFA13? (I know, we need to update) We split our time between being nutmegged and generally shown-up skill wise in real life football and then the week after go through it all again in the virtual world. This taps into something the young people genuinely want to do, in fact, when asked what they would do with £1500 the most popular suggestion was to buy some proper goals to use in our games! Over the one and a half years(ish) this project has been running we have got to know some of the lads well, we’ve had to deal with the ball being stolen by the older students (real flashback moment that one), and suffered in the heat of the gym; through all of it we want to show our care for them and share in the classic pursuit of football. For the future we hope to develop our relationships with these young people and stay with them through their time at school.

Grace and Andrew spent last Saturday in Manchester. Why we hear you ask? It was time for 2014’s Youth Work Summit!

 

They arrived, bleary eyed after a 5am start, at !Audacious (think large warehouse & cool interiors…) uncertain about what to expect from a conference with the name ‘Open Your Eyes’. However, what followed was a whirlwind of inspiration, fun and encouragement. The conference took on the super engaging form of many speakers only having a 10 minute slot each – this meant for snappy, well-thought through talks that really packed a punch. We heard talks from big names such as Loretta Minghella (CEO of Christian Aid) and Shane Claiborne (full on ledge!), and other talks on topics ranging from pornography, living the life of a teenage girl, attachment and hope.

 

As well as the great talks there was also a chance for Grace and Andrew to visit the exhibition of stalls, all of which offered great resources and suggestions for youth work (as well as a stash of pic’n’mix). It was a real encouragement to both Grace and Andrew to be surrounded by such energised youth workers who are really passionate in seeing the younger generations be transformed by love and subsequently transform their societies and we came back buzzing with suggestions for the Choices team. Happy days.

 

We are delighted to announce that, after a number of months of planning and preparation, our newly redesigned website has been launched! We still have the same url: www.choicesaberdeen.org.uk.

 

We know you will all agree that our new website looks fantastic, and we hope you will find it easier to navigate than our old site. we have purposely tried to make the site more intuitive to navigate, to make our services more accessible for those we seek to support and to make it clearer to service users, funders and local supporters what we offer.

 

The design work and building of the site has been undertaken by Nick Wilmot, to whom we are most grateful!

We are excited to announce that Choices Youth Counsellor, Linsey Revell, has now completed a pilot of our Continual Professional Development Workshop ‘Promoting Positive Relationships in School’.  This interactive session has been developed in alignment with the GTCS standards and encourages and supports self reflection and the opportunity for the growth of self.  Participants are encouraged to ‘tap into their inner teenager’ and the session has proved a learning experience which equips them to be effectual in supporting young people’s resilience.
The pilot has been conducted at an Aberdeen City Secondary School and CPD sessions were also recently fully subscribed at the Scottish Guidance Association Annual Workshop Day earlier this month.  Evaluation have shown that over 80% of participants rated the workshop as excellent quality.  Some people said:
‘Really good, very thought provoking.’
‘Outstanding’
‘A useful insight into the things pupils are influenced by, but also a good chance to reflect on my past experiences as a pupil and how they shape me as a teacher.’
‘Very good made me think about myself as a teacher.’
‘I feel all staff worked really well together!’

We hope to be advertising more opportunities to participate in this CPD in the near future.

 

Choices Aberdeen is delighted to be chosen as one of the local charities AUSA will be supporting in 2014.  The students at Aberdeen University have a long tradition of doing a huge amount every year to raise money for good causes across Aberdeen city and shire.  Joy Gillespie, the Centre Manager at Choices Aberdeen said, ‘We are so pleased that AUSA have chosen to support our work with young people across the city.  We are grateful to have many Aberdeen University students volunteering with us and to have this additional fundraising partnership is fantastic.’  Emily Beever, this year’s President for Charities and Community at AUSA recently produced a video explaining more about the work of AUSA and some of the charities which they will be supporting in 2014.