Primary Care '09

I was asked to speak to a scarily large number of people, mainly midwives, at this conference at the NEC yesterday. I asked Jackie to put together a short DVD using clips from Dads Matter Too. So the audience of 800 (!!) saw Chris, Karl, Brett, Marcus and Lisa talking about the experiences they'd had at the hands of the maternity services. As this was mainly about how they felt excluded, this was challenging material for the audience, but several people came up to me afterwards to say how much they'd appreciated the presentation.

Centre for Social Justice

Juliette left three invitations for us to attend the Awards evening in London on 1st July. The CSJ expect the boss to attend, so that's Carolyn; a worker, that's me; and a dad. Which is a bit of a problem. How to decide who should go? But having talked it over with Den, Mark, Brett, Steven, Chris and Chris, everyone agreed that Marcus should have first option because he was unable to attend the Prince's Trust Celebrate Success evening back in November. He's had to check that he can get time off work and told me yesterday that he can. So that's the team that will be going.

It would be fantastic if we turned out to be one of the Award winners as we would use the money to rewrite the young dads-to-be course with the help of an accrediting body like ASDAN. This would mean that organisations using it might have a better chance of drawing down funds to run it. But looking at the other shortlisted groups on the CSJ website, we're up against strong opposition so we must be realistic about our chances of winning. Being on the shortlist itself is a great achievement.

Fatherhood Institute

A major case study of U-Too has been written up and can be found at

http://www.fatherhoodinstitute.org/index.php?id=13&cID=910

More good news

U-Too is on a short list of 13 organisations out of 335 that applied for an award from the Centre for Social Justice. This feels like a major achievement and we can all feel really proud. Juliette Ash from the CSJ came to Swindon last week to check us out. She met several of the young mums-to-be who had just completed their YMTB course in Swindon, together with Lesley Hogg, their tutor. Brett and April came into the Link Centre office, together with Harvey and Kailum, and then Mike took Juliette off to see Den, Lisa and Max over at Pembroke Park. The young parents talked about their experience of U-Too's courses and were photographed and filmed by John, who came with Juliette. Three of us have been invited the Awards ceremony in London on 1st July, when the 6 winners of the 2009 Awards will be announced. Details of the other short-listed organisations can be found at:

http://www.centreforsocialjustice.org.uk/default.asp?pageRef=296