Tag: Birmingham

Helping Birmingham Leadership Foundation use social media

Video by Punk Zebra for BLFLeaders

Birmingham Leadership Foundation helps new and aspiring leaders to emerge. They connect emerging leaders with established leaders to help them learn from each other’s experience.

They organise networking events, training and connect existing leadership development projects to encourage the next generation of leaders in Birmingham to develop – leaders who reflect the city’s demography. These could be:

  • A young person aged 16–30 with the ideas, ambition and spark to make an improvement to the lives of others in their local community.
  • A person who is proactive in their community.
  • A chief executive or senior manager of a private company or public sector organisation who wants to work with, and support, the local community but lacks the know how and contacts.

Nick and I ran a social media surgery at the Foundation’s first Monday Masterclass last month. We’ll be working with the young leaders at the upcoming Masterclasses, sharing social media skills to help them get out there, network, collaborate and make things happen.

We’re also helping the Foundation team with their social media strategy and to further develop their own social media skills.

Lozells & Birchfield Social Media Surgery, Small and perfectly formed.

I have been helping at a couple of surgeries now including the well established Central Birmingham Surgery and the Wolverhampton Surgery which I helped to get started and each one is different.

Lozells and Birchfield surgery is small and whilst the Central Birmingham surgery is run through podnosh on a voluntary basis this one forms part of our paid work.

Today I returned to Lozells Methodist Church to help the surgery manager Jo Burrill from our client  Midland Heart – a social housing organisation who work hard in communities, and 4 patients who’d registered for today. Selwyn looking for support with his email, Chris and Kevin both with WordPress enquires and Verona who wanted some help posting to a website. It was a nice number and while I helped Chris with his stuff and Jo helped Verona with hers the others got chatting and Kevin turned into an impromptu surgeon to help support Selwyn with his email problems – every one left  happy having received  the help they needed.

Everyone who has attended each of these surgeries either surgeon or patient has left satisfied with their input and that is is the measure of their success, it’s not the number of people that come through the door but being able to help the people that are there. So while in comparison to the to the city centre surgeries of Birmingham and Wolverhampton, Lozells and Birchfield’s Neighbourhood Surgery is small but it’s definitely perfectly formed.

Never been to a wedding; A social media surgery patient I’ll never forget

Methodist Church on Lozells Street Birmingham

Yesterday at the Lozells and Birchfield Social Media Surgery I was paired with a young man who was looking for help setting up a blog for an organisation he was involved with. I started as always by chatting with him a little bit about what the work he was doing and what they wanted to use the blog for when he said something that really pulled what he was trying to achieve into focus for me;

“The girls have babies and the boys shoot and stab each other. I’ve lost count of the amount of christenings and funerals I’ve been to but I’ve never been to a wedding that’s just not what we do”

– He was talking about life in Handsworth and Lozells as he knew it.

The patients name was Mosies, he is a 19 year old ex gang member from Handsworth, He’s not long been found not guilty on a very serious criminal charge, and by his own admittance has been in trouble with the law before, and now he’s taking that experience to not only try and turn his life around but also to try and change the gang culture that plagues youths in some parts of North Birmingham.

He along with other ex gang members from opposing groups in the area, some with criminal records for gang related activities have come together to form the New Day Foundation, They are aiming to try and combat gang culture targeting younger children to educate them on the realities of gang life and try to show them that there are other options to what they think is “normal”,  to change their futures so they can go to more wedding than funerals in their lives!

I sat for an hour and listened to Mosies as he told us about the path he’d taken to be sitting in the room with us that day. Where he’d come from, why he wanted to change the lives of people stuck with the perception that joining a gang was the only option and how he and the other members of his group hoped to do that.

He had the whole room enthralled and as he was telling us how at the age of 14 he stopped going out to the cinema with his friends so he could save his money to buy a gun and all I was thinking was look at you now! 5 years later a changed individual talking about the pride taken in earning money the “proper way”, looking forward to getting a mortgage and hoping the story of your experiences would in some way stop others having to go through it.

–  and that right there is what I like so much about the Social Media Surgery format; Only in a room where people are encouraged to talk to each other and help each other one on one would I have heard Mosies story. At a prescribed training session we’d have all sat in rows listening to one person talking and hoping to pick up the most relevant bits for our needs and no one would have realised the momentous journey this one young man had taken to be there with us.

 

Community Lover’s Guide To The Universe and Birmingham

Spines of Community Lover's Guide books arranged on a shelf

It’s been a little over 5 months since we first mentioned The Community Lovers Guide To The Universe : Birmingham and we’ve finally found some time to get around to to approaching people to write chapters for us.

Jo Burrill and Birgit Kehler are going to be covering Change Kitchen, Emma Woolfe will be writing about The Friends Of Cotteridge Park, Christ Unitt will be telling us about Created in Birmingham and James Yarker will be writing about Stan’s Cafe “Of All The People In The World” and there are still some email responses pending from other interesting projects we’ve contacted.

We’re hoping that the The Community Lovers Guide: Birmingham will be ready to be published by early next year, but that of course all depends on us getting all the content we need in time. So while we’re making a start approaching the groups from the suggestions in the comments of the last post Can you think of any other people/projects that would like to contribute? A lot can happen in 5 months and we’re just wondering if there is anything happening that may have slipped under our radar.