The Young People and the Education Team at Rossie worked tirelessly during October and November on our first ever “Youth Philanthropic Initiative”(YPI) project. Education staff used this as the catalyst and driver for our Broad General Education, Big Questions project planning last term.
The purpose of the YPI project is to raise awareness of social issues and local charities. The entire YPI process is intended to support young people develop skills and confidence through a contextualised learning experience and unique programme of teamwork, research, and competition. Teams choose a charity and based on research into their wants, needs and service deliver a pitch to a panel of judges. The winning team are then able to award their charity a grant of £3000 funded by the Wood Group.
The Project is currently the biggest independent initiative being delivered in Scottish education. YPI is managed and principally funded by ‘The Wood Foundation’ and a dedicated team within the Foundation works closely with all participating schools to fully realise opportunities for individual student and school settings.
Lynn Raynal and Alex Reid from the Foundation visited Rossie on the 17th of November to oversee our Big YPI Final and listen to the presentations made by our young people. They were truly delighted and “blown away” with the efforts of our staff and young people.
Our winning team for 2023 chose to focus on the “Western Isles Cancer Care Initiative”. Both young people in this team had personal experience of loss and suffering to cancer, and one had first-hand experience of what amazing work the initiative do. We were very proud of the efforts of all of our young people but special recognition must go to the winning team and the work they did to better inform themselves of their chosen charity and the confidence, self-belief and knowledge they demonstrated in delivering their presentation.
In breaking news, we were recently informed that a team of students from Montrose Academy have chosen Rossie as their nominated charity.
We welcomed them to our school last week so they could see what Rossie does and enable them to better understand our organisation and how we work to support the young people who live and study with us.
We are truly delighted to have been able to participate in this year’s event and hope that the YPI will become a regular event in our academic calendar.
Contact: Rob.Petrie@rossie.org.uk