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Matthew Spacie awarded an MBE in the Queen's New Year's Honours List Our founder, Matthew Spacie, was presented with an MBE (Member
of the British Empire) in February as part of the Queen's recognition
of work carried out in the Commonwealth. Matthew attended the ceremony
at Buckingham Palace to collect the award and was joined by Ashima
his wife, and parents. We are extremely excited that Matthew's commitment
has been recognised in this way and it is also a wonderful recognition
of the team's hard work and all our volunteers and donors' generous
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Magic Bus branches out with two new projects 2007 saw the launch of two new projects under the Magic Bus umbrella and the diagram helps us to illustrate the new structure. Alka Shesha who joined Magic Bus as a volunteer in 1999 was appointed programme coordinator/camp leader since in 2000, promoted to programme director in 2003, will now be heading Magic Bus Sport for Development. The new start up phases have now begun for Magic Bus Enterprise and Magic Bus Youth Project. Magic Bus Enterprise is a social enterprise committed to revenue generation for Magic Bus children's and youth projects. Magic Bus Youth Project is a new project in its research phase looking at Magic Bus graduates and other young people and their development of employability skills and mentorship through their search for sustainable livelihoods. |
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Our new recruits undergo an intensive 6 week induction programme 13 recruits from various background underwent a 6 week induction programme which was not less exciting than a roller coaster ride. They underwent trainings on development skills of children, sport skills, personal development, Magic Bus culture and ethos, creative expression and theatre and adventure outdoor training. Pramod's magical moment after the football training was obvious with his statement "You have given my life back to me". The last few days of the induction the entire programme team underwent a referesher and sat together with their teams to plan for the coming year. Laxmi, mentor, mentioned "This had been the best year so far, where we have laid our objectives so clearly". We would like to thank our expert trainers who have always been a very valuable part of Magic Bus, Atul Mathur, Vinita Saxena, Asif Basra and our in-house trainers Sanjay Patil, Chirag Sakhare, Ajay Shetty, Priyanka Sharma, Nitin Bane, Swapnil Tawde and Swapnil Jadhav. |
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| Magic Bus participates in a research initiative by Comic Relief & UK Sport Magic Bus is participating in a three-year joint research initiative that is being launched by Comic Relief and UK Sport's charity arm, International Development through Sport (IDS UK), to understand better the impact of sport in development. Our director, Ms. Alka Sesha and Monitoring & Evaluation manager
Ms. Sharmila Govande, attended a 5 day start up workshop held in
Tanzania on researching the hypothesis, 'Sport contributes to the
personal development and sense of well being of disadvantaged children
and young people and brings wider benefits to the community'
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Professor Fred Coalter visits Magic Bus Professor Fred Coalter made his annual visit to Magic Bus to work with the M&E team in the latest stage of the three year project to establish a simple and robust system to measure the impacts of our programmes. However, as the approach is much more about programme development than simple accountability, senior mentors joined in the sessions to help to develop the next stage of the programme. The team worked to produce a much simpler session reporting form which will give the M&E team relevant information, but also assist mentors to think more systematically about programme delivery. The team also had wide ranging discussions about the new Comic Relief/UK Sport project for peer leaders and developed a series of measurements to asses the effectiveness of this programme. These instruments will also eventually be used to assess the impacts of Magic Bus' other programmes and, most importantly, contribute to the development and improvement of these programmes. These sessions have established the basis for a constructive collaborative partnership between the mentors and the M&E team.
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Magic Bus wins a scholarship from ACCT In February Magic Bus won the chance
to attend the Association of Challenge Course Technology global
conference for free in Boston, USA, through a scholarship awarded
by ACCT and recommended by Adventure Rope, the company that built
our ropes course for us. James Cantor CEO of Adventure Rope part
funded the trip and our project manager Milind travelled to Boston
for the conference. Magic Bus was given the opportunity to make
a presentation to the delegates, who comprise the world's leading
builders and exponents of experiential learning through rope courses.
The conference helped raise our profile as the only ACCT course
provider in India and was an extremely useful networking opportunity.
Milind also spent 10 days with Magic Bus UK meeting a number of experts in experiential leanring and corporate training who were extremely generous with their time. A huge thank you to staff from Brathay, Outward Bound, Edinburgh University and YMCA for their encouragement and advice.
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A big thank you to James and ACCT for this opportunity. |
