The Irish Story
While growing up in Ireland, we spoke often at our annual Christmas dinners with my beautiful Grandma about getting out the camcorder and recording "The Story".
"The Story" in my instance was my Grandmaís deep knowledge of how the 4th generation dairy farm, which I was born on, was established in the 17th Century in Co Derry, Ireland. How it was then purchased and expanded by her great, great Father-in-Law in
the late 1800s with the proceeds of the sale of what she described as "The Largest Gold Nugget" ever found in Victoria, Australia. (Incidentally, Victoria is where I now find myself living after I migrated with my young family from the UK over 8 years ago)
However due to the busyness of farm life and her increasing dementia "The Story" never was recorded and when she passed some years ago it was a real family regret that most of her insight and knowledge went with her never to be told in full again.
Inspiration
As time moved on my regrets about "The Story" softened until one evening while searching of information on the new iPad I found this video of a seniorís technology training program in America called Senior TechRally -
http://vimeo.com/33328055
I had been for a number of months previously been looking for an opportunity to give back my 15+ years of IT project manager knowledge and experience to the community, in particular to those often excluded by technological changes i.e. seniors and disadvantaged
youth.
I got inspired by the Senior TechRally videos and realised I could make a positive difference by being part of something similar in Australia showing seniors, with the assistance of youth, how to use iPads to record short videos on the device and then
share them by email or onto YouTube with their families.
By creating a group of seniors who understood just how easy it now was to share their stories, these would live on for years to come and could be passed on with the simple click of a share button on YouTube.
Lack of Options in Victoria
So I started to look for similar training program in Victoria, Australia I could become part of but there was none that provided a similar model to Senior TechRally in which was great disappointment to me.
The main telecommunications companies and hardware providers only seemed to pay lip service to servicing the technology needs of Australia seniors so I determined to change this situation and I have!
Making Change Happen & Our First Event
On 20th April 2013 our first Senior Techies event took place in Camberwell, Victoria. This video from the host of the event explains the impact we hoped to have:
http://youtu.be/7wSQu8nxJS8
We had 28 seniors on our new 3 hour training course and 20 local Scouts, Ventures, Girl Guides, my own kids and work colleagues helping us with the interactive exercises with the seniors. About 1/3 of the attendees had never held an iPad, another 1/3 have
held one but didn’t know what to do next and the reminding 1/3 has basic knowledge.
Why we are Bothering!
We believe through creating Senior Techies myself and my youth trainers have been given the ability and indeed responsibility to deliver real and long-lasting positive physical and mental health benefits to seniors through the knowledge they gain from
our training courses.
By understanding the ease of finding, sharing and using information through iPad devices we believe that there can only be an improvement in a senior's relationship with their family/ friends.
If at a minimum we can provide them with an understanding of how to record their stories and post them online for their families to view, we will have achieved one of my main goals for this program.
$10,000 Tipping Point Goal
How we'll Use the Funds
We have a target for the next 12 months to deliver our sessions and ongoing support to over 200 Australia seniors- completely free of charge.
With our tipping point of $10,000 we can deliver two further Senior Techies courses and train up to 40 more seniors for free and also provide them compliemently post event technical support and an iTunes vouchers to purchase the Apps they want.
When we reach the main target of $35 000 we will be able to deliver 9 courses in total training over 200 seniors over the next 12 months. One lucky senior will also walk away with a new 16 GB Wifi iPad from each event if we hit all our funding goals.
We are committed to achieving this target and all funds raised in our campaign will go directly towards making this happen.
It is important to note that Senior Techies is not aligned with a particular telecommunications company, state government program community organisations or technology solutions at this time.
We have deliberately avoided engagement with these group as we wanted to get our program going as quickly as possible and with my experience in delivering IT projects within such organisation, while well meaning, they can cause momentum to slow down and
make projects more complicated than they should be.
We have decided to provide training on iPads initially as this is the technology we use in our everyday lives and are familiar with but in future the training could be extended to Surface and Andriod devices also.
Outcomes and Impact.
How powerful will it be for a son to get a video link from his father and by viewing it understand why he is the man he was and is today?
How great will it be for grandkids to see their grandparents online either through their video recordings or in regular FaceTime/ Skype Calls?
How fantastic for seniors to understand that they can message and communicate on the go with family and friends?
How amazing for them to know that any information they could ever need is behind a Google Search box?
There will be many more unintended consequences that we discover through the stories the attendees and their families will be encouraged to share on our FaceBook page to inspire others. The will be many ripples of goodness that will certainly flow out
from this.
Thank you so much for taking the time to read about our project, if you have any questions please contact us on
[email protected], follow us on twitter @ideascanhappen and like us on Facebook for all the updates and post event photos and video at
www.facebook.com/seniortechies.