This weekend marked the 2 year anniversary of the WHO announcement declaring Covid 19 a global pandemic; and it has prompted me to reflect on the way in which the pandemic has affected our charity.

The charity sector, as a whole, has been hit hard by the pandemic and subsequent national lockdowns. Indeed, Charity Commission research found that

“The most striking finding is that nearly all charities were impacted by the pandemic – over 90% told us that they have experienced some negative impact from Covid-19, whether on their service delivery, finances, staff, or indeed on staff morale, resulting from the months of frustration and uncertainty. The majority (60%) saw a loss of income, and a third (32%) said they experienced a shortage of volunteers.As a small charity we didn’t face the issues of our larger more established counterparts in terms of staffing and volunteers.”

However, it also highlighted the adaptability of the charity sector siting the relative lack of charities folding as evidence of this. While, like others, we have seen our income reduced, we are such a small charity that we were lucky not to suffer in the same way with staffing and the immobilisation of volunteers. Our biggest concern became how we would continue to deliver training for the universities with which we had already established such positive working relationships; and how we go about developing and growing new links with lecture rooms sitting empty and course leaders facing the challenge of redesigning their offering in these exceptional circumstances.

WIth a session already in the diary for May 2020 (mid lock down 1), we decided to attempt to voice over the presentation we’d already prepared and send it to Bath Spa University for them to use with their students during an online lecture. The feedback was great and no less than we had received when delivering a similar workshop at the university the year before. So, with the summer holidays approaching and the prospect of university lectures remaining largely online for the following academic year, we set about creating a virtual offering. A film that could be used in our physical absence combined with a live question and answer session to follow the film. WIth the swift improvement in the use of technology across the board, university lecturers and students had quickly become used to sitting in front of their computers and being met by a sea of fellow student’s faces from all parts of the country, joining together as an online community to continue their studies. It began to dawn on us then that, unlike the constraints we had previously faced with travel and logistics forcing us stay relatively local in our offerings to universities, geography was no longer a limiting factor. All of a sudden, we could say yes to a 'speaking’ engagement in Dundee in the morning, and also to one in Winchester in the afternoon of the same day! As universities and students embraced online learning, our audience grew exponentially!

And, while It took us a little longer to get up to speed with the technical know how we needed to match that of the bigger establishments, we got there! So, armed with a film and a zoom account, we set out to offer our training session to as many universities as we could.

Since then our film, The Importance of Literacy for All - The Teach Us Too Perspective, has been watched by hundreds of trainee teachers along with already established professionals undertaking masters courses or specialist studies from all corners of the UK. The live Q&A sessions, delivered via online platforms such as Zoom and MS Teams, have enabled that ‘in person’ feel that is so important in humanising a topic such as ours; and enabled students to get the most out the sessions. We have had magnificent feedback from them and continue to work hard to increase our audience so that as many teachers as possible hear of the importance of literacy education and the dangers of making assumptions based on labels.

If you would like us to run a session for your students, please do get in touch via email.