SI Newcastle member, Heather Niven was successful in applying to the Hadrian Trust for £500 which will be spent on the New Start Bags project.
Another SI Newcastle member, Cris Young, provided club members with handy cards to give to friends, family and work colleagues as an aide memoire as to what can be added to the bags. Her colleague and friend, Barbara Tingate, donated all the contents of one of our New Start Bag when she requested support from her work colleagues in April 2017. She made the kind donation as her daughter Laura, whom she used to buy clothes for, left home to set up her own home with her partner.
As she no longer had to support Laura she decided to give a donation to our group in Newcastle to hopefully make a difference and support women who needed a New Start Bag. This generosity was over and above what had been expected and Cris was overwhelmed by her kindness
Lyn is contacting all the Metro Centre staff to ask for support and to donate items for the New Start bags. This campaign will run from June 12th until July 10th. Lyn will collect the items in her office until someone from our group can pick them up.
Heather was also successful in applying to Killfrost Ltd for a grant of £2,200 for the purchase of an Orcam My Eye device for Lee Harding. Heather met Lee when she was conducting mock interviews with students on the Project Choice course at Gateshead College. Lee received the equipment on April 7th as well as training from Orcam on how to use it safely. It took a couple of hours to go through all the different features and ensure Lee was confident with using it. ,
Lee (pictured here with one of his college teachers), has Alstom’s Syndrome which is more complex and more devastating that just sight loss.
He had an older brother with the same condition and who sadly died.
The OrCam is a new, specialised device, comprising of a small camera which takes pictures and from this it reads out the text from books, computer screens etc. It also has facial recognition and can recognise different objects. It senses different gestures which prompts the Orcam to tell the time or find the nearest door, etc. This would give Lee a lot more independence by allowing Lee to read things for himself and by making him more aware of the world around him.
Heather is also in the process of applying to other charities for further funding so watch this space…
