• Social Enterprise of the Year Award
• Northwest Business of the Year Award

Photographs can be found on the EMBF website, and photographs of Sylvia at the awards can be found in our photo gallery.

We hope to see you there.

We hope that you will all stay safe and you will all take care whilst traveling.

Sylvia said “I am so proud to have been awarded the “Community Woman of the Year” award.  This is thanks to the hard work of my team at Wai Yin – the management committee, the staff, the volunteers and the service users.  Without those people, this would not have been possible.  I would especially like to thank my fellow Senior Managers – Lisa Mok and Jenny Tsang.  They are so proud of my achievements and Wai Yin’s achievements, and are able to bear witness to the generosity and praise that Wai Yin is awarded.  It means so much to me that Wai Yin is recognised in this way.”

Sylvia was nominated for this award by Samantha Tran, who used to work for Wai Yin in our Youth Project before she left to work for Manchester City Council. Samantha still comes back regularly to visit Wai Yin, and still has a wonderful friendship with Wai Yin. Sylvia said it was a great honour to recieve the award and she was very touched that Samantha was the person who nominated her. Sylvia has done a lot of work for Wai Yin and the Chinese community, and we all think that this is an excellent accolade for her. Congratulations to Sylvia! We all hope her hard work continues for many years to come.

Photographs of Sylvia at the event can be found in our photo gallery.

The second thing that we have achieved is our dream.  Wai Yin has had this dream since it was founded in 1988.  A dream of not relying on rented accommodation.  A dream of not moving from one building to another.  A dream of owning our own building.  On Thursday 8th October 2009, Wai Yin achieved that dream.  We are now owners of a building on Swan Street, near the CIS Building.  We are very proud to own this building, as it is now our own community centre.  We have been given a mortgage of 75% of the building from Royal Bank of Scotland, which we are very pleased to have been given.  It is very kind of RBS to give us this.

It will be a long time, however, before Wai Yin moves into its new home.  There is a lot of work that needs to be done with the health and safety of the building to make it suitable for use.  There are many things that need to be changed.  But, from next week onwards, our Education, Training and Employment Unit will be using the building to run some classes from as early as next week.  As we still have one year left on our contract in our Mosely Street building, we are going to remain here until September 2010, and then all of the staff will relocate to Swan Street.

We think that owning the new building is an excellent achievement.  Many organisations are using rented premises, so for an organisation to have its own building is a great milestone.  We want to thank all of the staff, the volunteers and the service users of Wai Yin, and all of the companies we have worked with and will work with for their help in making our dream come true.  This is a really big dream that Wai Yin has had, and it has now become a reality.  And for it to happen on our 20th Anniversary is even more remarkable.

This time, we are focusing on our Media section.  We have photos hosted by Google Picasa and videos hosted by YouTube.  As much as we love them, we want to bring the photos and the videos more to you, without having to change how you see the content.  So we’ve moved the video gallery and the photo gallery direct to our site.  Just click the Galleries link and select either the Photo gallery or the Video gallery.

We’ve also started using Vimeo to publish some of our videos.  Basically, YouTube limit the length of the videos to just 10 minutes, where Vimeo only limit that you are the owner of the content.  So we are using Vimeo to show some of our longer content.  We’ve also put these into the video channel.

We’re making small changes constantly.  If you want to make any suggestions, simply send us an email.

Kwok Man Restaurant has kindly donated some karaoke equipment to our Older People’s project.  We want to say a big thank you, as this kind of equipment is not cheap.  It has also helped us to set up a new social activity for our Older service users – our Karaoke Club.  It runs at our Sheung Lok Luncheon Club every Friday afternoon, and sessions cost £2 each.  So thank you very much Kwok Man!!!

I just want to announce that today is the big day. For anyone who is looking at the website right now, you will see that it has been replaced by a “Website Under Maintenance” page. That’s because we have finished everything we need to for the site and will hope to put the new site online by around 3pm.

Thanks a lot for your patience and we hope that the new site will be much better for you.

Nathan

First of all, we’ve got the new blog, which you are viewing.  Like it?  We decided that, as much as we love Google’s Blogger software, it wasn’t exactly what we wanted.  Sure it was cool, but it looked nothing like our site, so people didn’t get the smooth transition they would expect.  Enter our new blogging software – Wordpress.  It’s hugely powerful and it’s hugely cool.  So we’re looking forward to using it more.

Next, we have our calendar.  It was the most talked about feature in feedback sessions on the site.  We’ve done so much for this.  First we put the project calendars on the project information pages, then we added a help section to help you to find out more new and cool features in the calendar.  We’re also expanding the help feature to other cool things that we provide …

… including our new vCard feature.  Since we redesigned the site 2 years ago, we included a directory of all the staff, with contact email addresses for everyone.  Now, if you use Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, Apple Mail or any major email software package, you can download a small (1Kb in size) virtual contact card, which you can import directly into your email software.  It includes many details to make sure that you never lose contact with our staff.

We’ve also made it easier for you to contact our staff directly, especially if you don’t use any email software.  Now, in the directory, you can click the staff member’s email address, and you can directly email the member of staff with our new contact form direct from the site.  It works with any member of staff who has an email address or a button.

We’ve got a couple of new features on the home page too.  A small snippet of all the stories that appear in the latest news section appear on the home page, as well as the people who fund us and a Featured Content pane, where you can find information about all the important stories happening at Wai Yin.

Throughout the site, we have included “Quick Links” – access to the most important information.  We can will change these links regularly, depending on the content that people access more regularly.  We have also changed the menu structure, and cross-linked our pages so that related links appear on the pages too.

That’s just a few of the changes we’ve made.  We hope that you enjoy the new site and that you use it well.  As always, keep us up to date with any changes that you would like to see.

Nathan