Guest Blog: Spark & Mettle
Spark & Mettle were supporters of last year’s A Good Week, so we’re delighted to welcome them back in for 2012. Here’s a little bit more about them, and the Good that they do!
We’re thrilled to be involved with A Good Week for the second year and to see how A Very Good Company’s idea has grown during that time. When A Good Week launched in June 2011, Spark+Mettle was little more than an idea—a good idea, perhaps.
Now, twelve months on, we’re billing ourselves as an aspirations agency that likes to help people flourish. We’ve been working with 13 young people on our Star Track programme, co-creating an innovative online and offline programme to help them shape, support and accelerate their emerging talent. And by the end of the programme, our impact will have reached another 100 young people. You can find out more about our approach through this video.
All of it has been achieved by the voluntary support of our core team of six, a handful of regular volunteers, and scores of others who have had a few minutes to spare. We’ve been building a community of likeminded people who are committed to enabling young people from less privileged backgrounds to fulfill their potential, and who love going about it in engaging and fun ways. To us, that’s a good thing.
In the next year our programme Star Track is expanding to give intensive, personalised support to 30 young people, while impacting over 450 more. This means we’re on the lookout for transformative volunteers who are keen to connect with less privileged young people and act as their ‘agent’ over the next 12 months. Agents are not mentors: the way we’ve been shaping the role is much more level, the knowledge sharing much more two-way. Each agent has a pair of young people that they engage with over the year, forging long-lasting bonds.
In the meantime, here’s to another Good Week and a good year for everyone who is engaging in good across the globe. Chin chin!
Eugenie Teasley (on behalf of Spark+Mettle)
-
If you have some time to spare and would like to donate it to Spark & Mettle, you can find out more by visiting their volunteer page. There you’ll find 22 volunteering opportunities available right now. We wish them another 12 months (and many more years) of doing Good.