New partnerships with Hafod and Treforest day centre
September’s been a good month for Take Charge in terms of new partnerships. On Wednesday 11th September we delivered our first lot of training to the tenants at Ty Cornel – a Hafod supported housing scheme. Jane, Lance and Matthew completed Heartstart training and are looking forward to delving into Health and Safety next month!
We’ve also started working with a group of individuals from Treforest Day Centre on Friday 13th September. Their first session with us was carrying out some conservation tasks alongside the Cardiff rangers at Forest Farm. They cleared a section of land behind the warden centre to make room for a new raised accessible pond. They had to work together to get the job done so it was a great opportunity to practice team working skills as well as using new tools and following Health and Safety instructions.
The group from Treforest came out with us again on Friday 20th September. This time they joined us at the Secret Garden project at Saint Fagans and tried their hand at gardening. The group carried out various tasks – they did some watering, weeded the patio areas and collected and spread leaf mould onto the flower beds. Once again it was a good setting to practise working as a team and a chance to try out a different kind of volunteering. They teamed up with the existing Secret Garden volunteers so it was also a chance for them to meet and work alongside some new people.
We’ll be working with the Treforest group again next month – this time we’ll be going to them to deliver some training at the day centre.
The Makaton Games 16.09.19
We held a second Makaton session on the 16th September – this time we made it a competition! We started off by practising some of the signs we learnt last session – we introduced ourselves and practised our finger spelling.
We then split the group into 2 teams and they had to compete against each other to guess the sign for certain words. We then asked them to guess what was being signed by Take Charge staff. We covered natural signs, food, drinks and animals. It was a fun way to get people thinking about and learning some new signs – the element of competition definitely got people motivated!
Vale fire buddies take 2 23.09.19
On Monday 23rd September we held our second Fire Buddies session in the Vale, at the Barry Hub. This time we were supported by Ollie, one of our Take Charge participants, who had volunteered to help deliver the session. Ollie took his role very seriously and was a great help on the day. He handed out the resources, supported the group with the practical exercises, helped with the hazard spotting corrections and gave lots of great fire safety examples from his own experience.
