Blog

Our website has meta-morphed through quite a number of designs over the year. Each redesign has brought with it better ease of use, access to information, enabling us to communicate more clearly with our visitors and supporters. You’ve already seen that we’re starting to blog about architecture, and I’m hoping that the complete rebuild that I’m working on now, which will be let into the wild at the end of June, will step our communication up another notch, making accessing up-to-date, relevant information easier still, enabling supporters and interested parties to make more informed decisions regarding the charity.

Features such as a weekly updated tally of all our donations and expenditures will keep increase the resolution of our transparency, as will making all our accounts back to 2005 available for download. The accounts section will also make comparisons between last month and last year, to give you a sense of how out money ebbs and flows. People will be able to donate online, and we’re to start a monthly email communicating relevant, detailed information about growth and change in the charity. Read on »

Latest page to be added to the website:

There’s not much history of education in the area where we built our school, that’s why we built it there after all. But it means that there is also a shortage of people educated enough to be teachers; Ash and I found ourselves with a bit of a chicken and egg situation on our hands.

Something that is important to us at Educate for Life is building local capacity at all opportunities, it makes sense on so many levels that it just seems the most obvious thing to do. If we employ a local teacher, say from Bakhel, the village where our school is built, then first up they speak the local language, which is obviously pretty useful. Another quite obvious point is that they also understand the local customs and cultures, which can vary as much as the language does in India and are important to get right. Then there is the fact that we want our schools to compliment and be woven into the societies where we build them, and there is no better way than doing that than with everyone being local.

Read the rest here.

As part of an on-going process of making life at Educate for Life a bit clearer, we’ve made all our accounts available online. Read our Accountability page.

It’s hard not to be inspired by all the fantastic goings on at Hunar Ghar at them moment. The teachers and team have taken it and made it their own, and are even making Ash and I feel a little redundant! On Saturday the teachers invited Ash to sit in on some of their classes and asked him to provide some feedback; these are the same teachers who 20 months ago would sometimes storm off home when we asked them to do informal learning with the children.

I celebration of this(!), I have made special effort this last week to finish of the website redesign that I started a couple of months ago. Our website was stagnating, and did not represent the charity properly. We’ve updated the design, added more content, got rid of the old rubbish (there were still pages on there talking about us just starting a school!), added more photos, and over the next few weeks we’ll be adding more photos still as well as current videos of the school and information from around the inter-web that corroborates with our thoughts on education and development.

It should then be a more accurate account of the charity, increase transparency (such as our quarterly accounts in India being available for download) and clarity, and  will be a better resource for people interested in informal education and development.

educateforlife.co.uk isworking again. Huzzah! Unfortunately, I still can’t access the old content of educateforlife.co.uk, so still remain without lots of things, but at least my t-shirt has the right address on it again.