Developing a range of secure mentoring websites for The Brightside Trust and aspiring young students in the UK.
Introducing The Brightside Trust
The Brightside Trust is a charity that supports young people who aspire to go into a range of professions after higher education. We’ve built seven sites for The Brightside Trust so far including: Bright Journals for healthcare/medicine; Big Bang Blogs for aspiring physicists; Big Deal Blogs for business entrepreneurs; Future Blogs for Chemistry; Ladders2Law; Live Journals for engineering and Gateway to Progression.
The challenge
The Brightside Trust asked us to design a new type of online community; that supports online mentoring of school pupils by undergraduates already studying subjects like medicine, physics, law, chemistry, business and engineering at university. The sites had to engage young people, with the potential to succeed but who needed additional inspiration to help them finish school and get into Higher Education.
What we did
Following a pilot in 2003-04, we developed a suite of software via OTHERobjects that encourages mentoring conversations, trains mentors, allows discussions between project coordinators and provides access to a rich library of resources. Our first project was Bright Journals for aspiring healthcare professionals; this included personal but shared blogs kept by mentor and mentee as a record of conversations. This successful format has since been rolled out to six more subject-geared sites. More recent websites for Brightside have utilised Twitter to send cheap text messages, while a ‘Ruby on Rails’ prototyping project has helped dramatically speed up development time on projects.
The results
Bright Journals is now in its fourth year and involves mentors from over 25 universities nationwide; the scheme reaches thousands of young people each year. Subsequent sites such as Future Blogs and Big Deal Blogs, have enjoyed a similar success in take-up. Our future projects include Bright Knowledge, which will consolidate all articles and resources from across all seven Brightside sites into one central repository.