Legacy

Following on from the success of LEGACY 2018, the ‘community action’ programme attracted more than 30 students to compete for the title of WINNER of LEGACY 2019.
The aim of this programme is to establish two competing teams, each with their own community action project, to raise awareness of and/or improve, however little, the lives of people in the community. The two teams for this academic year were Project Relief and Team Utopia.

Members of Project Relief tackled the issue of ‘homelessness’ in Birmingham – a project they inherited from last year’s team ‘Project Reform’ who won LEGACY 2018. They organized themselves into four sub-teams, each with its own team leader: Communications Team, Promotions Team, Media Team, and Finance Team. All four teams worked closely with each other to organize various fundraising events through weekly meetings and via Microsoft OneNote – a cloud-based collaboration tool. The fundraising events included a bake sale, sporting events, workshops, assemblies, social media pages, penny collection, and field visits to various charities and soup kitchens including Sifa Fireside, Let’s Feed Brum, Homeless One, and Tooting Community Kitchen. Their efforts culminated in more than 100 care packages that contained many items and toiletries for both males and females along with written messages to liven their spirits, which they gave out to the homeless at an event organized by Homeless One – a charity that provides hot meals to the homeless.

Team Utopia chose to focused their efforts on raising awareness about ‘Mental health’ issues and help dispel the taboo associated with it. To do this, they organized themselves into four sub-teams, each with its own team leader: Content Production Team, Media Team, Communications Team, and Finance Team. All four teams worked closely with each other to organize various awareness workshops and assemblies through weekly meetings and via Microsoft OneNote. These included assemblies and workshops with KS3 and Year 10 students both at KEVI HGS for Boys and KEVI Handsworth for Girls, at various times in the year including Enrichment Days at school. They also did a bake sale as a joint fundraising venture with Project Relief to raise funds for their bespoke hoodies, and to give to their chosen mental health charity. Furthermore, in their efforts to raise awareness of their project they also created a YouTube channel and an Instagram page to document their journey and penned an article piece in the school’s Bridge Magazine.

On Wednesday 12th June 2019, both teams went head-to-head in front of a panel of judges comprised of Dr. Bird (Headmaster), Dr. Stephens (Chair of Governing Body) and Prof. Biddlestone (former Vice Chair of Governing Body). During this FINAL PITCHING CHALLENGE, both teams took turns to present their Digital Story (video) followed by a digitally aided, verbal presentation and finished with a round of grueling questions by the judges. Both teams did a terrific job overall and the judges took a long time to deliberate and judge each team against three keys areas: Personal Development (key personal skills and qualities), Social Impact, and Presentation. It was a closely contested challenge with both teams scoring maximum points for two out of the three categories and one team scoring one point less for Presentation. Our congratulations to Project Relief for winning LEGACY 2019.

Both teams did a terrific job this year to establish their own Legacy in the community. In fact, Team Utopia will be continuing their project into next year and will lead several workshops on Mental Health in September during the Y12 Induction Days in collaboration with Mr. Bird (Head of Sixth Form).

Mr. F. Ahmed
(Head of Enrichment Studies)