Making an impact sharing Your Story

Recently Ecorys and the British Council celebrated the impact and success of the organisations and individuals that we fund through two events: our Valorisation Conference and the award ceremony for our Your Story competition. These events are our chance to meet you in person and to hear your stories.  The entries we received for our Your Story competition, and the presentations at our Valorisation Conference, were all inspiring, motivating and engaging and highlight how our funding helps to broaden horizons.  Spending time with our projects and hearing, in detail, the work that you have done really makes us proud to be part of the Lifelong Learning Programme.

Your Stories

Spread the Sign, Doncaster Deaf Trust

At our Valorisation Conference we had the chance to speak to the Doncaster Deaf Trust who have been involved in several Leonardo projects that support deaf and hearing impaired learners in vocational education and training.  Together, with their partners, they have worked on a Transfer of Innovation project called ‘Spread the Sign‘ which has developed a website with over 70,000 signs in 14 different sign languages, making it an ideal tool for vocational learners preparing to study or work abroad.

The Trust have used this tool to help as part of one of their other Leonardo Mobility projects, helping to prepare young deaf learners for their work placements in specialist deaf schools and colleges in Sweden, Germany and the Czech Republic. This experience has helped the students involved to secure employment and successfully transfer their skills into the labour market.

Dr Richard Spencer and Caroline Gaydon

While the Doncaster Deaf Trust are a great example of how connections can be made between projects and partners, our events are also a chance to network and can turn up unexpected connections. Our two Transversal entries for our Your Story competition, Caroline Gaydon and Richard Spencer both work at Stockton Riverside College, however neither knew this until shortly before our awards ceremony.

Speaking to them at the event, it was encouraging to hear that while they weren’t aware of this connection until recently, they were already looking to build on their successes and use their stories to engage and motivate other professionals within their organisation to plan their own Transversal Study Visit.

The two stories mentioned above are only a small selection of the stories we hear on a daily basis, you can find out more about the competition winners on our website www.competition.lifelonglearningprogramme.org.uk and you can also share your story with us through Twitter, our blog and our Projects around the UK map.

Looking to the future

The next generation of programme will continue the inspiring and motivating work of the LLP.  At the Valorisation Conference we had the chance to hear from Vanessa Debiais-Sainton from the European Commission who highlighted a proposal for a top-up grant designed to help people with fewer opportunities participate in lifelong learning in the future.

From speaking to our projects, and seeing the range of entries for our Your Story competition, we can see that an inclusive future is something you are all working towards and something that we strongly work towards as well.  It looks like the future will continue to be inclusive, accessible and most of all, inspiring.

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