SI Bournemouth Members were delighted and honoured that Margaret Oldroyd, SIGBI President-Elect, joined the Mayor of Bournemouth, Rita Renton (President of SI Southern England), members of our Friendship Link SI Penrith and over 100 other Soroptimists and guests on 18th May to help us celebrate 75 years of service to Soroptimism and to Bournemouth.
They were also grateful for the support of Soroptimists from Ashford, Central and South West London, Kingston-upon-Thames, Oxford (including SIGBI Vice-President, Jenny Vince), Poole, Southampton, Stockport and Woking, former Soroptimists and Catherine Welch, Guide Commissioner for Dorset.
Mayor of Bournemouth, President SI Bournemouth Kirsteen Harding,
Bournemouth School for Girls – Georgina Murray, Inger Nyman, Amy Gribble,
Speaker Roma Agrawal, President-Elect SIGBI Margaret Oldroyd,
President SI Southern England Rita Renton.
Since September 1938 members of the Club have given service to the local community as well as nationally and internationally and part of their celebrations looked forward to the next generation of women and to help people less fortunate than themselves.
With only one in five girls opting for the whole range of science subjects, they therefore decided to issue a STEM-based Science Challenge (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) last autumn to teams of girls in Years 9 and 10 at local schools, before they make subject choices for GCSE, A level and degree studies.
Margaret Oldroyd told the Club, “Your competition embodies the SIGBI mission to inspire action and transform lives. It focuses on women and girls, on educating, enabling and empowering them by making them aware of new career choices and helps them to acquire new skills and confidence. Our young women/people are full of ideas and more than able to take up the challenge which you set to improve the world which they are going to lead.”
The Challenge was to design, build and cost a project to help people in the poorest parts of our world. It had to be sustainable, fit for purpose and cost effective in a world where 884 million people lack access to clean water, nearly three and a half million people die each year from water, sanitation and hygiene related causes and every 20 seconds a child dies from a water related illness.
Five judges drawn from local companies and organizations – Bournemouth Borough Council, Fonix, Procter and Gamble and Sembcorp Bournemouth Water – selected the winning projects, one in each year group, in March.
The winners of the “Celebrating Science Challenge” were:
- The Arnewood School, New Milton (Year 9 Key Stage 3) with their “The Water-Phant” – a simple device, with no moving parts and minimal maintenance, to produce clean water from contaminated supplies using the principle of evaporation and condensation.
Eleanor Procter, Savannah Contreras, Lois Fry Samuels, Roma Agrawal (Speaker), Jemma Wood.
- Bournemouth School for Girls (Year 10 Key Stage 4) with their project SNAID (Snake Aid) – promoting the capture of venomous snakes and the extraction and selling of their venom for medical research and treatments.
Amy Gribble, Georgina Murray, Inger Nyman, Harriett Haworth (not pictured),
Roma Agrawal (Speaker), David Parfitt (Teacher).
The judges had been inspired by the girls’ enthusiasm, the quality of their ideas and the way that the girls worked together, developing and presenting their ideas.
The girls said how much they had enjoyed the Challenge and how much they had learned about the problems of the developing world and possible ways of relieving them as well as learning a whole range of new skills in developing their projects. One girl commented: “This was the most interesting and exciting project I have ever been involved in”. For three of the girls the Challenge has resulted in their choosing the triple science option, having had no thought of doing so before.
After presenting their projects to those attending the Celebration Lunch, the winners of the Celebrating Science Challenge and their respective schools received their prizes (£250 for each winning team and £250 for their respective schools) at the Bournemouth International Centre on 18th May in the presence of the Mayor of Bournemouth, Cllr Phil Stanley-Watts. The prizes were presented by Roma Agrawal, Young Structural Engineer of the Year 2011 and Senior Structural Engineer on The Shard, London, Europe’s tallest building.
Roma – a remarkable and accomplished young woman – spoke of the “brilliant school presentations” and of Soroptimist International as an “inspiring organization for women”. Stressing that nearly everything in our lives depends on engineering, she spoke of her six years working on The Shard and of the great opportunities open to girls in engineering, pointing out that only 8% of all structural engineers were women.
Margaret Oldroyd spoke of the vision of the 15 professional women who decided to form SI Bournemouth in the difficult times of 1938 and congratulated the Club on turning its founder members’ vision and dream into action by celebrating its 75th anniversary “by having a vision for others and setting about turning that into reality and … showing so clearly that what makes our organization special is that we are women helping other women to a better life.”
SI Bournemouth is grateful to the schools and the local individual and company sponsors for their support for its “Celebrating Science Challenge”, to the teams who entered the Challenge – and to Tref Mitchell, SI Southampton, who made the superb celebration cake!
Recalling that, just 40 years ago Bournemouth’s second woman Mayor, Miss Leslie Swetenham, was, unusually for that time, an Engineer, President Kirsteen was pleased to announce that the Club would be running another similar Science Challenge next year.