Central Foundation Girls’ School (CFGS) in Tower Hamlets, East London

Central Foundation Girls’ School is a large, oversubscribed and inclusive inner-city girls’ school in Bow, London with 1,400 students age 11-18, 72% of which are Bangladeshi with 75% Muslim and 60% with a home language other than English. Already a Performing Arts Specialist School, it has now developed a second specialism called “Voice” which focuses on communication, empowerment and democracy through the subject areas of English and Citizenship. It aims to educate tomorrow’s women by promoting their development as leaders, champions of environmental sustainability and active citizens.

More than 40 girls applied for a place on the Apps for Good course, but only 20 of them will be able to attend the course, where some of the former Apps for Good students will now be working as educators.

The lessons will take place twice a week as part of the Central+ programme. Central+ is an activity project for after school hours developed by CFGS, which offers the girls the opportunity to follow different activities such as learning street dance, joining a cinema club or going horse riding, among others.

Ben Cole, Head of Community at CFGS told us: “All the girls who applied for the course want to achieve something and they see this programme as a real opportunity for them. They see themselves as privileged kids because they are getting an education and Apps for Good has given them the chance to put their passion for technologies to the service of the community in a practical way by developing apps that will solve specific problems around them.”

If you want to celebrate the launch of our second community with us you can register here: appsforgirls.eventbrite.com

Just in case you are unfamiliar with TeachingLeaders: Set-up in 2009, they train and develop outstanding school leaders (e.g. heads of department) in challenging inner-city schools, so as to directly raise pupil achievement and aspirations. They have got off to a rapid start with strong support from the government and the major political parties and are now in 87 schools across the South East of England. You can find out more about them on the TeachingLeaders website. Beyond the National College key partners are TeachFirst, ARK and FutureLeaders.

Initially I struggled to come up with a meaningful call to action, but then 2 weeks ago I stumbled across a short article in the Evening Standard mentioning that teachers were protesting very narrow exam frameworks, which did not really allow pupils to learn critical skills. With CDI’s educational inspiration Paulo Freire in the back of my mind I had my call for these 80 aspiring leaders in schools: to go beyond narrow learning targets and to enable young people to think critically and to set and achieve their own ambitions.

We will be launching in Central Foundation Girls’ School in 3 weeks time and I’m very excited to see if CDI Europe and Apps for Good can help to make this call a reality … more about this in our next blog post. (You can already register online via our Eventbrite page)

The full presentation can be viewed here:

As in other countries, inmates often come from broken homes. They have little education and few skills that could get them a regular job. For many, crime is not a career choice, it is the only thing they know how to do… Recently Mark Gregory, BBC Worldwide reporter, met a man who has devoted his life to creating an alternative. Read more…

Your Big Year is supporting a total of 24 charities through the fund-raising done by the competitors. 12 Charities have been chosen by Your Big Year with Rights and Humanities as the lead Charity and CDI is one of them! Find out more at www.yourbigyear.com

Follow Your Big Year and CDI Europe on Twitter.

We had been invited to speak and share our experience, which resulted in the following presentation:

You can read the summary of the talk on the Betavine Wiki including the other speakers like Laura Walker Hudson from FrontlineSMS.

Charles Leadbeater, CDI Europe trustee, went looking for radical new forms of education and found them in the slums of Rio and Kibera, where some of the world’s poorest kids are finding transformative new ways to learn. And this informal, disruptive new kind of school, he says, is what all schools need to become.

Watch Charlie’s TED talk here:

Here we are again! This time we hope the sun would shine for us and we can enjoy our monthly networking drinks at Las Iguanas terrace.

This event is for people interested in mobile, technology and social change: charities, developers, business people, journalists, youth workers, young people… Join us. You won’t leave without meeting someone interesting!

When: Thursday, 03 June 2010 6-11pm
Where: Las Iguanas, 1 Horner Square E1 6AA, London – inside Spitalfields Market View Map

Hosted by Apps for Good & CDI Europe. Everybody welcome!

After analysing how to take the Telecentre Mobile back to the devastated communities with the funding already received through Global Giving we have reached a very interesting solution, reducing to US$1.250 per month the operational cost of the project.

By the end of this week we will be reaching out to local NGOs for them to apply to receive for one month the Telecentre Mobile at their headquarters.  We will provide them with the equipment, training and funding for them to run the Telecentre during one month, then it will move on to the next NGO and town in the South of Chile.  At least 6 new places will be visited with the Telecentre Mobile with a new focus:  Giving people, small companies and organisations access and training in order for them to use the ICT in their reconstruction process.

Each NGO that receives the Mobile Telecentre will be rewarded in January 2011 with one of notebooks used in the Mobile Telecentre.  During this activity in which the notebooks will be given to the NGOs CDI Chile will make a presentation of the results and the impact of the mobile telecentre project.

Thanks to the support from TechSoup Global and several of the Partners, UNESCO and the Global Giving platform we have the funding for 4 of the 6 months.  With your support we will for sure raise the US$ 2.500 during to reach the last two locations.

In one month we will make a new update with the locations and NGOs selected.

Read more about this project here and have a look at more pictures here

Having a tea break? Fancy some interesting and inspiring reading? Sarah Lacy has written an uplifting piece on CDI Global for TechCrunch worth spending a few minutes of your time in front of your computer. Read here and leave your comments.

Instead of our monthly drinks in Spitalfields we are running a special event where the 9 young people on the first Apps for Good course will pitch the ideas they came up with so far, before they are start building the apps with their developer mentors:

• When: Tuesday, 11 May 2010 from 6.45pm until 10pm
  
• Where: The Hub Kings Cross, 34b York Way, London N1 9AB map

Please RSVP via our Eventbrite page