With the generous support of Charlie Goldsmith Associates*, we’ve been able to expand our schools programme across Sheffield, targeting schools that wouldn’t normally be able to access this kind of educational activity.

Our Donor for a Day workshop is lively and interactive, challenging the students’ perceptions of foreign aid through debating current hot topics in the news. The students also work together to decide on how to allocate foreign aid in a fictional crisis. To learn more about the workshop, see this article.

Our new programme started with Handsworth Grange Community Sports College, where we ran the workshop for twenty year-11 students. Their teacher, Greg Spicer, thought the workshop would be excellent preparation for their geography GCSE, which can incorporate questions on foreign aid and which also includes a Sustainable Decision Making paper. After the workshop he told us,

“The workshop was extremely informative, and the decision making part of the session was brilliant for getting the students to think about the underlying complexities. In this case it was obviously focused on aid, but I felt like the discussions that they had were also really good for just getting them to think more about the mechanics behind decision making. All the students I have talked to about the session where really positive about it and found it interesting and also useful.”

*Charlie Goldsmith Associates works in post-conflict, fragile and emerging countries, using context-suitable technology to build practical management systems, so government colleagues can get basic services delivered and establish and sustain core public administration. They specialize in designing and implementing systems and coaching civil servants; they can and do write assessments and policies, but they care most about implementation. To find out more about their work, see their website. We are very excited to be partnering with them on this programme, and thank them for their generous support to deprived communities in the North of England.