Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Renovations in the Future Arts Office

Posted on: May 2nd, 2012 by Hayley No Comments

I came into Future Arts after a bit of time off for Easter, and when I walked in I was sur­prised to find that ren­o­va­tions were under way in the build­ing. The office is get­ting a makeover, and I’m impressed with how it is turn­ing out!

When I walked into the build­ing I was greeted with funky green walls which suit the cre­ative and inno­v­a­tive envi­ron­ment here at Future Arts. Comfy new sofas wel­come vis­i­tors so they have some­where to sit when they arrive, and dig­i­tal pic­ture frames proudly dis­play pho­tos from over the years which show­case the peo­ple that are part of the team. New rugs, lamps, and tables fill the office, fresh­en­ing up the place and keep­ing it stylish.

No one would ever say that Future Arts is bor­ing now that when you walk down­stairs there are unmiss­able lilac and yel­low walls. We also now have a room des­ig­nated for youth train­ing which was a much needed install­ment. Many other changes have taken place down­stairs, such as new floors in the kitchen and new locks on the doors, which makes me really look for­ward to work­ing in the office when all these changes are com­plete.

 

 

So your doing what? Volunteering, ah right?

Posted on: February 20th, 2012 by Margaret No Comments

A brief look at my experience

The job mar­ket is dif­fi­cult in cur­rent cli­mate and for me the whole sit­u­a­tion was dri­ving me crazy. With 1.04 mil­lion 18–24 year olds unem­ployed, actu­ally get­ting a job inter­view was the hard bit. As some­one who had worked from the age of 15, being unem­ployed I found men­tally and phys­i­cally strain­ing. Even as some­one who had a degree, I was find­ing it dif­fi­cult, hav­ing applied for grad­u­ate pro­grams and not get­ting any­where was soul destroy­ing, often being told that I was overqual­i­fied for posi­tions I was keen to get into. To tell the truth depres­sion took hold as the same rou­tine dragged on for nearly three months. It was at this point that my mum sug­gested the won­der­ful world of vol­un­teer­ing, some­thing I had done as a teen,  mil­len­nium vol­un­teers,  but to which I hadn’t even thought about. My first instinct was to go to Vol­un­tary Action Leeds and see pre­cisely what they had to offer, I mean I’m not great with kids, ani­mals, nature is a big no no, and sick peo­ple, well obvi­ously I empathise with them but its not really me. I saw adver­tise­ment but the major­ity took, 3–4 weeks to process my appli­ca­tion, could I sur­vive that long? Seri­ously it seemed like a long draw out process. Three days or so later, an adver­tise­ment popped up on two places that had been watch­ing, both adver­tis­ing vol­un­tary place­ments at Future Arts.

Future Arts, was some­where that was dif­fer­ent, it was some­where that firstly I had never heard of, but who had a great web­site, yes I judged the place on the web­site. I have always been inter­ested in dig­i­tal media and was keen to get into event man­age­ment and PR. Both of these were areas that Future Arts catered for. So I sent off my CV, and cov­er­ing let­ter, I was keen to do this so I sent off a ref­er­ence. Two days went by and noth­ing. So I e-mail them again, the next day I get a phone call, say­ing they were really sorry had been really busy and would I come for an induc­tion the fol­low­ing Friday.

After my induc­tion, I started the fol­low­ing Tues­day, I was a lit­tle fright­ened but the staff and other vol­un­teers were so nice and even the young peo­ple were polite. I started on my first big task which would be plan­ning an event for the launch of a new prod­uct. I was thrilled and as my time grew and my con­fi­dence grew, I received more respon­si­bil­ity. I felt like I was mak­ing a dif­fer­ence, and as the work towards the event veered off I wanted to help in other areas of the busi­ness such as admin­is­tra­tion and pub­lic rela­tions. My expe­ri­ence at Future Arts was sec­ond to none, I had never worked any­where where I felt that the work I was doing was mak­ing a dif­fer­ence to soci­ety as a whole.

 

If want to vol­un­teer with Future Arts, please e-mail your CV and Cover let­ter to volunteers@futurearts.co.uk

 

 

 

So, in 2012 will Google+ trample all over facebooks, erm, face?

Posted on: September 28th, 2011 by Daniel No Comments

Today I signed up for a sparkly new google+ account.

It felt like I should.

And as of now, I have exactly zero friends on it.

I don’t under­stand it. I  don’t even like it all that much.

But, if the inter­webs tech-gurus are to be believed, we should all jump  on board. NOW. Cos by next year, face­book will be lying on its back, kick­ing its legs wildy in the air, doing its best impres­sion of myspace. Which ini­tially makes me a bit sad, as face­book has pro­vided at least  some sort of enter­tain­ment for me, espe­cially dur­ing the ad breaks for TOWIE.  Their was even the time my friend changed his rela­tion­ship sta­tus from “Mar­ried” to “Sin­gle” one evening while I was watch­ing DIY SOS and I spat my hob-nob out all over my velour jog­ging bot­toms (don’t judge)

Ahhh.…memories

So, what exactly does Google think its play­ing at? Tap­ping into a mar­ket which is surely com­pletely sat­u­rated. Face­book lets you pre­tend to have 400 friends, when you don’t. Linkedin lets you appear to be all business-like, when you’re not. Twit­ter lets you stalk celebri­ties and bebo lets you pre­tend to be 15.

Any­way, I digress. Here is why the peo­ple in the know believe Google+ will take over the world;

Google is actu­ally serious

They have spent a lot of money and have ploughed a lot of time into this.…and let’s be hon­est, Google doesn’t fail. Ever. Notably they have adopted a lis­ten­ing ear, and relied heav­ily on the input of focus groups,  steer­ing Google+ towards what they believe will be the ulti­mate user experience.

Its a bit of a cross-breed

Can this approach actu­ally work? Face­book filled our boots as far as net­work­ing with friends and fam­ily went, then came along twit­ter and opened up the celebrity world by allow­ing one-way con­nec­tions, finally linkedin chipped in to ful­fill our busi­ness net­work­ing needs. Well with Google+, or more impor­tantly with “cir­cles” — Google have invented the swiss army knife of social networking.

Google owns search

Google is Google, and that rea­son per­haps alone should lead us to eas­ily believe that this project should, and prob­a­bly will work. They have their own search engine, and to a cer­tain extent can be in con­trol of its own suc­cess. The +1 but­ton is their vari­a­tion on the “Like” but­ton, and is quickly becom­ing more promi­nent.  Busi­nesses über-keen on SEO are already believ­ing that the use of the +1 but­ton will auto­mat­i­cally ben­e­fit their search engine rank­ing, Google are remain­ing tight-lipped, suprisingly!

So, these points con­sid­ered, is Face­books future doomed, and Google+ des­tined to succeed?

I’m actu­ally not too sure.

Don’t get me wrong, Face­book and Twit­ter aren’t immov­able. If some­thing truly rev­o­lu­tion­ary comes along peo­ple will leave as fast as they came. But I’m just not sure Google have nailed it yet.

 

EraseTV out and about in Leeds

Posted on: August 17th, 2011 by Daniel No Comments

Over the com­ing weeks the crew from EraseTV will be busy help­ing young peo­ple with mul­ti­me­dia work­shops and assist­ing them as they film doc­u­men­taries where they can present their own views in their own style. (more…)