Red Balloon support No5 Young People
At Red Balloon we’ve a long standing history of supporting local causes and is part of our core mission as a business. One such charity we work with is No5 Young people.
No5 supports children and young people’s mental health in Reading. They offer free, confidential counselling to young people aged 10-25. No5 also offers a schools counselling service, and support young people to share their experiences of mental health and represent the charity through their Young Ambassador scheme. In 2016/2017 they offered 3,932 counselling sessions to 388 children, young people and their families.
In December this year Dan and Mark ran the Reading 5K Santa run in aid of No5 and at last count managed to raise over £500, surpassing our target and expectations. This could not have been achieved without the generosity of both family, friends and clients – so a massive thank you to all who donated. We are already looking forward to see how we can assist this great cause in the new year and continue the support they offer our local community.
For more information on the work No.5 does please visit their website here
You can still support our work for No.5 by donating via our Justgiving page here
The Rising Sun Arts Centre
Earlier this year Red Balloon opened its doors to two interns from the Rising Sun arts centre who came to work alongside the team for a week to gain experience in design and digital projects.
The Rising Sun Arts Centre is a small, independent arts centre, which for 25 years has been staffed and run by volunteers. The Rising Sun started as a squat, created by a group of intrepid artists who saw a need for ground-level arts development, for and by, the people of Reading. The centre gained charity status in the mid-90s, and has been at the heart of Reading’s cultural life ever since.
Imogen, Sofia, Mark and Dan discussing project strategy
With the centre relying on fundraising through the promotion of community based events, we took Imogen and Sofia through our agile design processes, including design sprints and they produced a landing page for the annual Here Comes the Sun festival 2017 – a day of live music, art and creativity for the local community.
Both Red Balloon and the girls from the Rising Sun enjoyed the week and both parties finished the week learning a lot. For us it validated our internal process documentation and how well these can be taught to potential new team members whilst they left with new skills to take with them on the next step of their development.
For more information on the Rising Sun, please visit them here
The result of their hard work – a landing page for the Rising Sun’s annual festival.
