Hello everyone. I hope you have had a lovely Easter break! Since the last blog post in January, there have been many updates about our VIP. Unlike all other blog posts, I’m writing this piece in my student accommodation at Bath in a sunny and breezy afternoon.
Over the last two months, our work has revolved mainly around two tasks. One task is to analyse the survey data and transfer major interpretations into a PowerPoint document which can be at our disposal to reach a wider audience. Another task is to organise an age-friend VIP workshop targeting young adults at the University of Bath. While we say two tasks, the survey and the workshop are highly interrelated. In semester two, we negotiated a new meeting time, 11:00 (UKT), to address the time zone issues. Thank you all for accommodating my time!
Our first group meeting in semester two
Back in January, we had a meeting with Anna Boneham, Volunteer and Society Manager from the SU, to explore our promotional and recruitment strategies for our upcoming workshop. During the meeting, we discussed how we could make good use of the SU’s networks as well as how to reach out to other agencies, such as Age UK. One important piece of advice that we took from Anna is to think about incentives for our event. Of course, we are not saying that free food and drinks are the primary reason for students to join our workshop. But they could be something nice to have. 
Meeting with Anna on 18 January 2023 (while I was out having a Chinese New Year dinner)
I then wrote to Dr. Molly Conisbee from the South West Doctoral Training Partnership (SWDTP) to see if funding opportunities were available for an event like this. She advised me to apply for the SWDTP Cohort Building Fund if I could identify a collaborator who is an SWDTP-funded student. And fortunately, we have Beth on our team! The application went smoothly, and we are truly grateful for SWDTP’s generous support. As a result, we received £303.75 fund for our workshop.
In February and March, Edwina and Refilwe were working on a poster for the event promotion. They created three posters and sought feedback from the team. Below is one piece of work designed by Refilwe.
As we had more concrete details, such as the objectives, date, time, and venue of the workshop, we would need to make further amendments to the poster. I took the initiative on this, but once I got access to the template, I found it incredibly hard to develop from others’ artwork. Therefore, I decided to have a try myself and created another poster with the needed information. As we believe it would be helpful to have our own VIP logo, I created a major one with several versions in terms of colours, shapes, and abbreviations of the University of Bath.
Here are the final logos that we go for. We can use the square or the round logo depending on the platforms.
And now, our workshop details are finalised. We sincerely invite you all to join us at the workshop on 26 April 2023 (next Wednesday) from 1:30pm to 3:30pm at CB.3.11. So please do come to have a chat and register here at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/age-friendly-vip-workshop-tickets-594487567317. 
We hope to see you soon!
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