SWALLOW Charity made good use of a Small Grant award by running a number of online safety workshops, both for their members and for other people in our community. Here’s their report on how the events went:
The project was very successful and engaged a total of 28 participants across three workshops. We worked with Alex Roland of ‘Your It Now’ who delivered the workshops for us. Two of the workshops were aimed directly at our members with learning disabilities, reaching 24 in total.
The sessions were really interactive, with games and quizzes too, and generally our members were confident in asking questions and talking about their experiences. Some were interested to get some practical help in changing their privacy settings etc, which was a great outcome. A member told us ‘I’m so glad Alex could help me to make my Facebook account more private.’
They also covered cyber bullying, spotting fake news, keeping passwords safe and online shopping safety. The facilitator also delivered a community workshop, based 
at our Radstock Café. A total of four older people attended this workshop (including the mother of one of our members that took part) and they all reported learning something new from the session – and in the case of the mother of our member, she was eager to learn ways of better supporting her adult child with his internet use.