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This year at the Arts Festival, The VSA partners with ASSITEJ South Africa, a networking platform for people working with or interested in theatre for children and young people. The organisation makes a significant mark on the festival, bringing 10 high quality productions, workshops and other exciting activities to the festival.

With some shows already sold-out, families visiting the ASSITEJ Family Venue will enjoy stimulating, enriching and diverse theatre experiences from some of the most esteemed theatre-makers for young audiences, including Nicholas Ellenbogen, Jori Snell, Rob Murray, and Lynne Joffe. The venue, Oatlands Preparatory, is conveniently situated on African Street, with additional access from Luke Street, and just up Douglas Lane from the Fiddler’s Hub.

The VSA will be present at the ASSITEJ Family Venue with its mobile awareNet lab (in the coffee shop next to the show hall) to allow visitors to leave their opinions and feedback in a sociable, collaborative and child-friendly space. Show visitors will, for example, have the opportunity to blog about the show they have watched and win one of our daily prizes for the best blog. All blogs will be accumulated into a Festival Bulletin Project.

Further the VSA will be unveiling a new social creativity booster on awareNet to enhance the children’s art experience at the venue. Development of the new Scribble-App was inspired by playDUcation. Users can upload pictures and work on them in an artistic and free manner, then save the new picture and add it to the projects. To get an idea of how that will look like, please have a look at Bea Beste’s webpage.

Visitors of the family venue can access the platform from their mobile devices (free via WiFi) or provided laptops. Festival runs from Thursday 28/6/12 – 6/7/12.

We are very proud to announce that the VSA’s awareNet programme made it into the second and final round of the Impumelelo Social Innovation Awards. Impumelelo is not only the leading independent awards programme for social innovation in South Africa, but also an unsurpassed repository of exceptional models of best practice across a wide range of development sectors. Social innovations are public service projects that solve public problems in creative ways. Impumelelo unearths these initiatives through an annual awards programme.

The VSA will have to present the project to Impumelelo’s Panel of Judges at the Final Adjudication meeting at the 12^th or 13^th July 2012 in Cape Town. This is very exciting! Hold your thumbs for us!

The awareNet Youth Fun Run is the VSA’s second community event that will hopefully become an annual event happening in the Grahamstown township (Rhini). The VSA plans, organises and prepares events on awareNet, together with the community, to give everyone a chance to participate, discuss their ideas and be involved in the outcome.

On Peace Day (21/09), it’s all about writing lyrics and performing HipHop on stage. For Youth Day (16/06), awareNet users learn about fitness, healthy life-styles and prepare for the awareNet Youth Fun Run. 4 schools exchanged their experiences in the forums, blogs and project sections on awareNet while training with professional runner and community coordinator Terri-Lynn Penney.

The awareNet Youth Fun Run took place at Ntsika Secondary School and 3 additional schools were invited to take part, so in the end, Ntsika SS, Ntsiko P, CM Vellem HPS, Nombulelo SS, Archie Mbolekwa S, Ntaba Maria S and Kuyasa SS all ran together (almost 300 learners) and had great fun!

The first boy home was Nkosinathi Kubale (Ntsika SS) who finished in a time of 7 minutes 20 seconds. Second home was Masixole Xayiya (Archie Mbolekwa S) in 7:30, while third was Zipho Busani (Archie Mbolekwa S) in 7:50.
The first girl home was Unathi Sonanzi (Archie Mbolekwa S), who finished in 8:58. Simamkele Femngwa (Ntsika SS) was second in 10:19 and Yolande Mbangata (Archie Mbolekwa S) was third in 10:50. We would like to thank Zola Budd Pieterse for the donation of medals and a number of local businesses (e.g. Run/Walk for Life, Albany Sports, Rhodes Sports Admin, BP, Pick’n Pay, Fishtales, Spar, Debonnairs, Steers, Spur, Rob Beer) for the donation of prizes and other equipment.

The 3 additional schools became very interested in awareNet and are planning to join awareNet in the coming term. We are looking forward to the new awareNet users and the next awareNet Youth Fun Run in 2013!