Wednesday 30 July 2008

Wanganui East School Graduation Today Our Biggest So Far

We are taking a big huge step forward today with a graduation celebration for 28 students from our latest classes. These classes have been running on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nights at Wanganui East School during June and July. Our students were from families with children at various schools around Wanganui. We will be featuring photographs and stories from this milestone event next week.

This is our 15th graduation and it will take us to a total of 135 families who have computers in homes. This leaves 15 families to engage to complete our funding agreement allocation of 150. They have been identified and will be starting classes at Wanganui East and Aberfeldy Schools in August.

It is sad that we have finished recruiting and prepare to complete the final reporting requirements for our agreement with the Digital Strategy Community Partnership Fund to run the project.

On the other hand, it is fantastic that we will be evaluating the impacts of the project through our Rejuvenation Programme which includes a family survey and a computer WOF. As we collect this information we are already discovering CIH has made a very big positive difference to the participation families. As well as helping the children, parents are benefiting too. Around a quarter of surveys completed so far identify a parent or caregiver who has undertaken more training or education since graduation and a quarter of the surveys found a parent or caregiver had got a job or undertaken a volunteer role.

Our project is worth continuing beyond its existing commitments. We have accumulated a lot of experience and capability in Wanganui. We are looking forward to the release of the new Digital Strategy 2 when it released in August and will be using this as our springboard to move forward. We are also pleased to have established strong collaborations and working relationships in Wanganui so far and we will be leveraging these to generate new initiatives to grow the project.