It is with great pleasure that we announce the winners of the Rank Memorial Award 2020. This year, the Memorial Award criteria had a particular focus on resilience, in addition to the general criteria of “exploring a specific area of personal interest, relating to our work that will serve to inspire, educate or promote the interests, values or ethos of the Foundation.”
Despite the lows of lockdown and the current Covid19 crisis, the Memorial Award received more applications than ever before which in turn made it particularly difficult to select a winner. Therefore, we are delighted to announce that the selection committee has awarded three Memorial Awards at £6,500 each to Joe Russo, Hannah Ciotkowski and Geraldine Cooper.
Joe Russo
Joe, founder of Major Grant recipient organisation Enthusiasm Trust, will be heading to Los Angeles and Glasgow to explore two organisations whose work, philosophies and aims particularly resonate with Joe’s own experiences of supporting disadvantaged young people at risk of exploitation and gang association. In LA, Joe will be spending time with Homeboy Industries, an organisation that aims to provide hope, training and support to formerly gang-involved and previously incarcerated men and women, allowing them to redirect their lives and become contributing members of the community. In Glasgow, Joe will be spending time with the Scottish Violence Reduction Unit, who specialise in tackling the problem of knife crime and is a national centre of expertise on violence.
Hannah Ciotkowski
Hannah, current Time to Shine Leader at Kissing it Better, will be heading to Northern and Central Australia where a growing number of older people suffer from chronic loneliness. Hannah’s current role at KIB looks at offering young people meaningful volunteering experience inside hospitals and care homes. Since the Covid19 pandemic, KIB has had to adapt their services, and set up a ‘volunteering from home’ programme, with Hannah running this for Duke of Edinburgh participants to support elderly people virtually. Hannah’s main aim in Australia would be to learn from isolated, elderly communities in the Northern Territory and other more remote areas of Australia, many of whom have had to cope with serious isolation issues all their lives. She will also be including a visit to Professor Brian Dolan who works in Australia on the ‘End PJ Paralysis’ campaign – an initiative that encourages older patients to wear their own clothes in hospital, as well as visiting ‘The Last 1000 Days’ project that charts the importance of giving older people the best chance of making the most of their last 3 years of life. In addition to this, Hannah will work with young Australians who are already volunteering from home, looking at the way they are successfully supporting the most vulnerable in their society.
Geraldine Cooper
Geraldine, 2019 Time to Shine Leader at Newington Day Centre, will be traveling to San Francisco, Belgium and Liverpool to find out how other countries experience and cope with dementia within their population. Geraldine will visit the Alzheimer’s Association in San Francisco for a fortnight to volunteer with them in the lead up to ‘The Longest Day’ fundraising event, where thousands of participants from across the world come together to fight the darkness of Alzheimer’s through an activity of their choice. She will then move on to The Flanders Centre of Expertise on Dementia in Belgium for 5 days, to see in person how their model works, speak to residents, staff and other members of the community to see how they feel this new holistic model of care for people living with dementia works for them. Then finally, Geraldine will then travel to The Centre for Collaborative Innovation in Dementia Living Lab at Liverpool John Moore University. She will spend 4 days visiting the lab and discover how they work with people with dementia to co-create tools, apps and resources which will improve their day to day experience of living with dementia.
We would like to congratulate Joe, Hannah and Geraldine on their successful applications and we will be hearing from them during and after their travels.