Yesterday afternoon we were at the House of Lords for the TalkTalk Digital Heroes Awards ceremony. It was a fitting finale for what has been a fantastic competition packed full of incredible individuals working for equally amazing projects.
As well as recognising all twelve regional finalists, each of whom will receive a £5,000 grant for their projects and free broadband from TalkTalk, we announced the overall winner of the competition, as chosen by the competition’s panel of judges which included dotcom entrepreneur and UK Digital Champion Martha Lane and TalkTalk Chairman Charles Dunstone, to receive an overall prize of £10,000.
The judges unanimously selected Chris Dredger from Storybook Dads as this year’s worthy winner. Chris, from Bideford in North Devon, received the most votes in the South West and for the judges captured the essence of the Digital Heroes Awards, by using technology to bring about positive social change and to reach an otherwise quite socially excluded group.
Storybook Dads helps maintain the vital emotional bond between prisoners and their children by helping offenders to record bedtime stories for their kids on CDs and DVDs. Not only does this help to keep families connected – which has been shown to reduce re-offending by up to six times – but it also helps imprisoned parents to gain useful literacy and computer skills, and help with the development of their children’s skills.
As an ex-offender himself, Chris has been working for Storybook Dads since his release and wants to help others just as Storybook Dads helped him when he was imprisoned. The grant will now help buy new video equipment to roll out the project in other prisons, as well as extending it to the Armed Forces. We hope that Storybook Dads – as well as the other eleven regional winners – goes from strength to strength and we will be following all their progress keenly in the coming year.
Every year we also reward one finalist the special Race Online 2012 prize for their contribution to its ambition to make the UK the first nation in the world where everyone can use the web. This year, the winner was Jean Raby of Age UK Darlington for her work in getting older people in learning to use digital technology including PCs, digital cameras and mobile phones. The project currently supports 165 people, who are older and often isolated members of the community, and is another very worthy winner.
We’d like to thank everyone who got involved in this year’s competition – from everyone who voted to those who nominated projects for the awards – for making it such a spectacular event, and we hope you’ll all be back next year for the Digital Heroes Awards 2012!
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |