Vita Nova - The Community Challenge

Project: The Community Challenge

Region: South west

Amount approved: £23,112

Vita Nova first grew out of Bournemouth Council’s theatre in education team in 1999 and have since become a charity and company delivering awareness raising work across Dorset and beyond on a variety of issues. Over this period, they have broadened their earlier drama-based remit to cover such methods as traditional workshops, education combined with art and more intensive awareness raising residencials. It is this latter teaching model that has been applied to this project, making it quite different from the majority of work Drinkaware funds.

Building on a substantial track record for delivering alcohol awareness projects, this intervention comprises a series of five daily sessions in the course of a week for each target primary school. Introductory sessions on day one familiarize pupils with Vita Nova staff and the project purposes, while presenting basic alcohol facts such as the positives and negatives of drinking, daily limits, peer pressure and personal safety. This information informs the rest of the residential and is kept visible on displays for the rest of the week.

The two following sessions involve interviews with local practitioners and people with alcohol dependencies of some kind. Pupils will have prepared questions under supervision and the information they glean will feed into the penultimate day’s work. This entails either the creation of some artwork or a theatre sketch encapsulating what they have learned. Pupils will be split into two separate groups for these sessions and will be guided by Vita Nova youth workers to ensure everybody benefits to exactly the same extent.

All the above will have been conducted by Vita Nova in three schools concurrently. The final fifth day sees the three schools coming together to perform their sketches and exhibit their artwork. In the course of the whole project, Vita Nova will repeat this process five times to a cluster of three schools on each occasion.

This initiative is a rare instance of achieving both extremely high reach and engagement, two qualities which we would normally expect applicants to balance as best they can. Furthermore, the evaluation from this project will provide a real insight into this more residential model and its effectiveness for primary school age children. If the value of this more extended learning for primary school children can be proven regarding alcohol, it could have considerable influence over Drinkaware’s notions of best practice and the types of youth projects we fund or endorse in the future.

Page last updated by: Unknown, 10 May 2012.

Page checked on: 12 Sep 2011