BlindFish Ideas

My view of the channel 4 show "Porn on the Brain" which is all about how teenegers might be being impact by watching porn online. I have just finished watching "Porn on the Brain"   (if you live outside UK Tunnel Bear can let you watch this) a Channel 4 British documentary by a previous editor of Loaded (lad mag) Martin Daubney . In this documentary Martin looks to try and find out what is the situation of porn and teenagers. Now sometimes the show becomes a little sensationalist with phrases like "The internet brought about the end of innocence" but behind some hype is some interesting stuff. With Martin spending 15 years of his life dedicated to (soft core) pornography with his work in loaded his perspective on the porn industry is not naive, he describes himself as an "wanking expert". Early in the show he makes a judgment of how he views the changes in the porn industry.  "Porn has lost its sense of humour and become something mac...

On the 11th of June the commons voted against making Sex and Relationship Education a compulsory part  of the national curriculum and specifically this amendment including the following "(1) For the purposes of this Part, personal, social and health education (“PSHE”) shall include sex and relationship education, including information about same-sex relationships, sexual violence, domestic violence and sexual consent. " My MP for Chester, Stephen Mosley was one of the MP who voted against this clause. You can read a good briefing on why this clause was so important here   by the sex education forum. This was a key opportunity to get SRE into the heart of what schools need to be providing. But MPs voted not to help young people on this issue and my MP was one of those who voted against. If you want to read more about the no vote, what it means and why it matters you can read Brook here  or read this blog post exploring how the clause may still have life in it ...

For the Youth Work Summit I decided to attempt some collection and storage of tweets with the #hashtag #yws13. Twitter has a great tool for staying up to date with the tweets as the come in but I wanted to also have a nice document back up which I created with www.ifttt.com . I hope its useful to people at the event and away form the event. Read more below.   Document collecting ALL #yws13 tweets here   Tweets about "#yws13" This automatic backing up of tweets is possible due to a handle little service called If This Then That found at www.ifttt.com. You sign up for an account and then create recipes for all kind of cool automations. Cross platform posting, getting emails warning you of weather warnings. The digital world is you oyster. Especially using the immensely powerful RSS feed trigger.  RSS feeds are amazing ways to share, organise and collect information. Most search engines have an RSS feed built in so that you can get automatic...

Over the last 2 weeks, for the first time I have taught a full Sex and Relationship Education trainer course. In the past I have helped out on someone elses course and have lead workshops on specific topics at events/conferences. This was the first time I took  responsibility for an entire course. The course I taught is the 4 day  Esteem Resource Network  course. This was the course I was originally trained in and 5 years and 500+ hours of classroom experience later I was now teaching the course. The course had 10 people and I loved opening up the wide field of Relationship and Sex Education to them.  On the course I had 1 co worker, 1 local church based child and family worker, 2 third year youth work students (one who has been on placement with me) and a herd of 6 second year youth work students. So basically everyone was a youth worker or similar  This helped me as it's the group of people I work with the most. I know ...

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...