August 2007

We have made significant progress over the past 12 months in delivering the outcomes agreed with The Big Lottery Fund. These fall into three areas – The Drinkaware Challenge Youth Achievement Award with UK Youth, other peer education schemes, and theatre in education projects.

The Drinkaware Challenge toolkit has now been launched to youth workers at a conference on 21 June 2007 entitled ‘Young People and Alcohol, a non-formal educational approach’. Development work included a whole series of ‘Youth Panels’ over the course of 2006 and early 2007, facilitated by experienced senior youth worker Andrew Cummings. UK Youth also sought opinions from their youth work network, and both sides reviewed available literature on the subject. 2000 copies have been produced as a first print run.

UK Youth and Drinkaware also collaborated on the booklet, ‘Where are your choices taking you?’ 5000 copies of which were printed and have been distributed at all of UK Youth’s relevant events over the past 12 months, including the Youth Achievement Awards Network Conference in Derbyshire in September 2006 and at ‘More Rungs on the Ladder – the contribution of non-formal learning to extending school provision’ conference in March 2006.

In summer 2006 we agreed to engage Epiphany Productions to create a short documentary film about The Drinkaware Challenge. We were impressed with their work for the BBC and Ministry of Defence in making a film about the ‘RAW’ (Reading and Writing) Project. The resulting twelve minute film includes interviews with a number of youth workers and young people from two projects, one in London and one in Leeds after it was decided that a ‘grassroots’ approach to the documentary was the most appropriate. The main aim of the film is to promote the Challenge to youth workers and to young people themselves. A copy of the film is included in all Drinkaware Challenge toolkits.

UK Youth and Drinkaware have identified the University of Teesside Social Futures Institute as an academic unit with a strong track record in the field of social research, to undertake evaluation of the Youth Achievement Awards, with emphasis on The Drinkaware Challenge. It is felt that a holistic and contextual approach to evaluation would be the most valuable.

Local initiative funding
The Trust’s new website now includes information about how to apply and how to evaluate your project. The Application Form and Evaluation Form are downloadable as Word documents and we encourage these to be emailed to us. The forms themselves have been revised to reflect best practice. It is likely that the forms will continue to develop, in particular the Evaluation Form which will be revised following staff training through the Charities Evaluation Service. For administration purposes, a new database of local projects has been created that allows much better tracking of projects over their lifespan.

During the first year of our Big Lottery Funded project we helped 53 local alcohol education projects, which reached 1784 young people directly, apart from those reached indirectly by public education campaigns. Five of these projects were funded specifically from money that we received from the Big Lottery Fund, being the projects run by the Borough of Poole, Tameside Borough Council, Exposure in North London, Streetwise in Newcastle, and St Teresa’s Youth Centre in Belfast.

Drinkaware has exhibited at events in order to promote its local initiative funding, including ‘Drugs and Alcohol Today’, ‘Mental Health Today’ (in London) and ‘Drugs and Alcohol Today Scotland’ (in Glasgow) in the past 12 months. We also attended two ‘Alcohol and the Family’ Conferences organised by Alcohol Concern and London Drug and Alcohol Network’s annual conference.

Evaluations received have included the following comments:

‘Some of those involved have volunteered to engage in peer education projects to combat the binge drinking of their peers as a result of this project.’ (Vale of Glamorgan Youth Services)

‘Workers of the project and bands that have been involved actually found that using some of their tips and advice…having a soft drink regularly helped them perform and work as a team better.’ (Learning Centre Network, Skye)

‘The peer educators reported a range of emotions about their experiences. They were initially nervous, terrified, and daunted, but after the initial feelings, all of them relaxed and presented the work well. All of them were excited and very upbeat about their experiences after the sessions.’ (Tameside BC).

‘The young people recruited from clients of the substance misuse team have completed and been discharged from the service with reported lower levels of alcohol use and problems. To date these young people haven not been re-referred to the service…100% of the participants said that their level of knowledge around alcohol had increased…six months later 75% said that they had reduced their own alcohol use…’ (Leicestershire Community Projects Trust).

Theatre in Education
During the first year of our Big Lottery funded project we have helped to fund 12 local theatre companies to go into schools, who together have brought powerful alcohol education messages to 16,901 young people. These plays took place in all parts of the United Kingdom. All of those funded indicated that without the support from the Trust they would not have been able to reach so many young people, particularly in schools where there are limited funds to bring in external theatre companies. Evaluations have been overwhelmingly excellent.

The challenge for us in years 2 and 3 is to collate and synthesize the information that we are gathering to help identify learnings.

Supporting Organisations
Organisations have consistently affirmed how important Drinkaware’s funding is to the success of their projects. In addition they have also made us of Drinkaware’s free materials and information available on our website.

One theatre company told us, “Information concerning alcohol has proved extremely useful in developing our work and has considerably enhanced the quality of the final product. Small groups such as ourselves, intimately linked to the communicates which we serve, sometimes struggle to find external support – Drinkaware Trust funding has allowed us to offer our project to young people in some of the most disadvantaged wards in Nottinghamshire that would not otherwise have accessed it.’ (Pintsize Theatre Co).

‘Your funding, moreover the rapid response to our request allowed us the timescale needed for the young people to develop their work organically. None of the other funders we approached could provide this turn around. This may otherwise have been an opportunity missed’. (Denton Young People’s Project).

“The funding was essential. Without Drinkaware funding the project would not have taken place. The Drinkaware website was helpful and supportive.’ (Durham County Council)

‘Without the funding it would have been very hard, if not impossible to do.’ (Borough of Poole).