What has changed this year?
Wai Yin has had a very good year this year. First of all, we celebrated our 20th Anniversary. It is a huge milestone for many organisations, especially charities. We want to thank all the staff, members of the management committee, volunteers and service users that have helped to develop Wai Yin’s services over the past 20 years. We couldn’t have achieved what we have without you.
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.
Updated our Media section .,…..
Updated our Media section .,.. more videos and better photo gallery. Check them out – http://www.waiyin.org.uk
They just keep coming …
Yes, we’re making more updates to the website. Only small ones, mind. But it’s all to improve your visit to our site.
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.
Thank you!!!
Every month, right at the beginning of the month, we have a staff meeting. We discuss how projects are running and find out a lot of new things. It’s all part of our information sharing “policy”. Well I found out something today that I thought I would announce.
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!!!
Exam day today for some of our…
Exam day today for some of our Working Links students. Good luck to them all!!!
Today’s the day …
Hi everyone,
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
Today’s the day … part 2
Well, that’s it. We’ve updated the site. And what a site it is. We’ve included so many new features that it’s impossible to tell you all of them, but we’ll give it a try …
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
Where we are now
Hello everyone. It’s been a while since we updated our blog. What can we say, we are busy little bees here at Wai Yin. We are too busy working for the good of the community that we don’t get chance to take a break to update this.
Well, we thought we would share some things with you. As you know, this year is Wai Yin’s 20th Anniversary . In 1988, Wai Yin was formed by a number of volunteers, and it has been running ever since with the same goal of serving the Chinese community. We are grateful for the help of all the volunteers, staff and service users from the past and the present. We recently put some photos online from the celebration. Go to http://picasaweb.google.com/WaiYinCWS/ to see the photos we have.
We also held our BME Volunteer Award Ceremony at Yang Sing Restaurant in March, and we had a huge response. We want to thank all of the volunteers who were nominated and all the winners, especially Karim West who won the overall award on the day. These volunteers are an inspiration to us all, and we want to thank them for their work in the community.
Some of our staff and volunteers have been working on some changes to the website. And these are not small changes, we are talking about a complete upheaval. Changing everything about the site. We’ve been working very hard on this, and we want to get as much feedback as we can. We want to launch the website on 22nd June, so we are asking for visitors to this site to help us by testing our new site. Log on to http://waiyin.comuv.com/ and find out more. There are two links that you will find – one for the site and one for the feedback form. We are constantly making changes to the pages on there, and hope that we will have ironed out all the bugs in time for the launch.
That’s all I can think of now, but I am sure that we will update you with many more things very soon.
Nathan
Wai Yin is now twittering. Ke…
Wai Yin is now twittering. Keep up with our latest developments. http://www.twitter.com/waiyincws
North West Celebrates ESF Successes
Do you remember the free ESOL classes we offered last year? What about our free DIY and Construction Skills workshops? Well, they were all financed by the Learning & Skills Council and JobCentre Plus, from the European Social Fund. Unfortunately, the funding was only until 31st December 2007, otherwise we would have continued the project.
Well, on Friday 27th June, Wai Yin was recognised for its achievements in its Women Construction Solutions Project at a lavish award ceremony at the Hilton Hotel. We were so proud to pick up the award for Embracing Diversity and also the Provider Excellence award. We are so grateful to the Learning & Skills Council and JobCentre Plus for giving us the money to run these projects as, without them, we would not have had the success of the projects, never mind achieving this award.
Have a look at http://www.esf.gov.uk/news/articles/nw_celebrates_success.asp for the article on the European Social Fund website, and we’ll have some photos available for you soon.
Thanks a lot to Sheila for developing the Women Construction Solutions project, and Lisa for managing all FIVE contracts by Learning & Skills Council and JobCentre Plus. I personally have never seen anyone so stressed until I started work here, but Lisa has still managed to be a very happy person.
But most importantly, we want to thank YOU, our service users. We reached thousands of people through the projects and over 120 for the Women Construction Solutions Project alone, and we couldn’t have done it without all of you.