BlindFish Ideas

GarethCheesman Radio 5 SRE The Talk uploaded by Gareth Cheesman On the 25th March I was invited on Tony Livesey's Monday night BBC Radio 5 Live talk show. Every Monday night they have a focus on Sex and Relationships. This week they focused on what should young people be told about sex and when and how should parents talk to their children about sex. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUwRQhU-Um4

Today I wanted to share a few short insights into the everyday realities for children and young people living in a HIV orphanage in Thailand. I visited this orphanage, The House of Grace, in 2012 whilst travelling around South East Asia (read my post about it here ). Like my work in UK this project is linked with ACET internationa l. Today I received an email from the project and wanted to share a few snapshots of what it is like for children and young people in Thailand being supported in The House of Grace. Funded and staffed by Christians the project provides a hope and a home for alone, rejected and something sick young people victims of HIV. Kitisak is the pastor who has dedicated his life to supporting these children and running the House of Grace. These hopefully give a snapshot of the rough and the smooth.  Arriving - Fah Nine year old Fah is one of the most recent children to join the House of Grace family. One evening, towards the end of December...

I think this is a great talk about charity. I work for two charities and live in the frustration of small scale and the desire to keep the overheads low. Now waste in overhead is always a bad thing but I cringe when I hear people being classed as overheads. Yes trim the budget on the travel by making sure people take the most reasonable train option but don't fire your face to face workers. Just because their face to face work involves talking to donors not clients. Your people are the real strength of any charity. please pay them a fair wage. If we believe non-profits serving communities deserve the best people doing the best they can. Then we need to pay a competitive wage. We can not short cut our way to success in the non-profit sector. We need to invest in growth and advertising.  I have two  lingering questions from this talk  "Is there a limit on what is reasonable to pay a charity worker or CEO?" "Can chariti...

BBC radio 5 interview about a drop in teenage pregnancy rate uploaded by Gareth Cheesman on the 27-2-13 I was interviewed by BBC radio 5 about the drop in UK teenage pregnancy rate. Read more about my work at www.SREstuff.com http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNWD_qfFB_k

I am a geek, I can not lie. I have always loved science, tech, sci-fi, LOTR, computers and board games. I regularly  get teased by my Girlfriend for checking my phone too often. Usually I am checking twitter, (my tech list) lifehacker, the tech and science section of BBC news and other sources of wonderful geeky news and information. But what I am trying to get my head around at the moment is this.  "Is tech running my life or helping me improve my life? " The tools that are designed to make my life easier and save time take time and effort. There is a huge range in tech in how much effort you need to put in. An example of low input high convenience is my amazon Kindle, kindle is a wonderful light ebook reader. It is meant to keep hundreds/thousands of books at your fingertips in one small device. The device is quite simple to use but you do need to keep it charged and have to get the books on it, Usually through the on board kindle book store or by using the webst...

I have started teaching a lesson on the media's portrayal of Sex and Relationship. The lesson focuses on movies, TV shows and visual pornography. But with all the media hype around 50 Shades of Grey I wanted to do a small scale survey of young people I work with to see if the hype had any grounding in reality. Are young people reading it and is it impacting young people?  At the end of a session looking at the Distortion of Media I handed out some small surveys. Just half a dozen questions and a space for general feedback. I did this with two year groups both mixed gender. A group of year 10 students (aged 14-15) and a group of year 12 students (aged 16-17). With the older group I also asked if the book had encouraged them to experiment with "BDSM/fetish/kinky stuff" but talking with school staff it was decided not to ask that direct question to the year 10 groups. Below are some of the figures from my study, please note it is very small scale and may not ref...

Gareth Cheesman talking about Teenage Pregnancy on BBC Merseyside uploaded by Gareth Cheesman I was invited to have a quick chat with Tony Snell on BBC radio Merseyside about teenage pregnancy and what we can do about it, especially in schools based Sex and Relationship Education http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVuR7lNCBlw