Adapting and Achieving during Covid

In the last year a lot has changed. You’ve heard that a lot. 

People have changed, education has changed and so have organisations. Have you noticed that some organisations have really stepped up in the last year and gone out of their way to help?

Uber and Pret have been offering free rides and meals for NHS staff, Nike supporting the safety precaution with their ‘Stay at home, play at home’ message. Burberry repurposed factories to make masks, helping toward the vaccine and have helped charities too. Many small local charities and community organisations have been providing meals to NHS staff and neighbours, checking on the vulnerable and elderly with daily calls and getting shopping for the people who have been shielding. Teachers have gone out of their way to offer support to their students, learning new technology and how to teach through it, working all hours to make sure every student is engaged and involved, some teachers have cycled round to check that children have food, and found ways to get technology and internet access to others.

Various apps like Zoom have been keeping us connected, and many others providing us with a bit of pleasant relief from the restrictions. Organisations such as Thinking Classroom have been hosting free Zoom Schools to get us all up to speed with online connectivity. As organisations have jumped to offer their services online this has actually increased access to some who have internet access but can’t travel.

We would like to share how we have also stepped up to help out over the last year too, and these are 5 ways that we have been helping a wide range of people in different parts of the world directly in response to the pandemic. Responding to the pandemic to further strengthen the support we offer in our three key areas of Access to Education, Resources for Educators, and Education Dialogue.


1. How we provided access to education support in response to Covid


We connected with our partners to see what challenges they had from Coronavirus that we could help directly with. It turned out that many students in the countries we work with did not have access to any education whilst in lockdown due to the digital divide. So we provided solar powered radios so that children in those remote areas could listen to their lessons which their governments were broadcasting by radio.


We also discovered an increase in violence against women, so we worked with our partners to set up Gender Based Violence workshops to bring this to light and work on ways to make women and girls safer in school.


In Cuba, women delivered the Positive Periods Programme via WhatsApp, connecting 20 women’s organisations who were learning new skills together during lockdown.


2. How we supported the Covid Stay Safe message with resources for educators


Lockdown has awoken a lively discussion about education and school. This is good for us as we are always keen to promote and foster conversation about education, and access to it. In support of the Coronavirus Stay Safe message, we published a resource pack called ‘Learning from Home’ which helped lots of parents and educators by pulling together all the useful resources they could be using for home learning into one place. We also used Social Media to connect with parents and educators, ask questions and offer practical support through our posts.


3. How we increased access to education online


As we were not able to attend events and give talks, we developed a Life Long Learning webinar series (free or by donation). We linked this webinar series to raising awareness of the digital divide, as not everyone in the world has access to online learning.

People across the globe were at home and were looking to learn about new things online.


We hosted storytelling sessions “Myths and Stories” with students from The Gambia, Haiti, Sierra Leone and the U.K. working together on-line to strengthen understanding between cultures. We also encouraged students in the UK and Poland to share poetry with each other.


4. How we helped people stay connected through an education dialogue


We thought at first that the webinars would just be informative, but we allowed ourselves to experiment and discovered that the post popular webinars were those that gave people the chance to be actively creative in ‘creating together’ webinars. In addition to webinars about Human Rights and Safeguarding we hosted webinars where the participants wrote poetry together, made art and showed each other what they had made, had discussions, watched films together with a live Q&A after. This has helped to build and strengthen our ‘Education for All’ community.


We have also created some Digital Charity Gifts for people to buy and share with their loved ones, this gives more people access to supporting us in a fun way, with a completely environmentally sound gift. We’ve had some lovely feedback to say that it has already helped people to connect, smile and say thank you.


5. How we helped people smile and gave hope


We increased our social media posts during lockdown to keep the conversation going about the positive impact we are having through the work we do. Our aim was to spread hope and positive messages about the successful impact we have been having to counteract some of the depressing statistics we have every night on our TV screens. We also posted ‘Smile Posts’ of children smiling and novelty treats like stop motion, and time lapse videos with positive quotes, so that there would be something to make people smile when they saw our feed. We now have a Good News email that is designed to encourage everyone to share positivity and hope. Ultimately, we need hope, and positivity, to make our dreams of education for all a reality.



The main point is this, Covid has been difficult for many, but many of us have made a stand for helping others and spreading hope and positivity. There are actually many fantastic things happening in the world right now. Many organisations, as well as us have been working away all year to make great things happen, because we want to encourage people to smile, have hope and most importantly continue learning and connecting with each other.


Thank you for reading and please leave a comment to let us know what was the best thing you saw happen last year.


Steve Sinnott • April 28, 2021

An Education Revolution

By Ann Beatty • April 6, 2025
This week while out and about in Hertfordshire and we visited the British Schools Museum. We discovered the first school opened by Joseph Lancaster, was known as the ‘Poor Childs Friend”, was in 1810. It was his lifelong mission that all children regardless of their circumstances, should benefit from an education. Apparently, Joseph heard a small girl say, “Oh that I could read!” and this inspired him to create a simple education system that eventually would benefit children across the world. Joseph was the tenth son of a poor man himself from South London. His aim was to offer free education for everyone. However, it would be 93 years before the U.K. government finally made education free for all. There are still many countries today where education is still not free to access and it is certainly not compulsory for primary and secondary age pupils. Joseph’s mission really resonates with that of the Foundation, to support access to education for all. We enjoyed our visit and appreciated the tour given by two of the Museum’s volunteers, Angela and Clare. They described some of the challenges faced in the early years of formal education and shared some of the rules that teachers and students had to abide by with us. 

Sparks Bristol

By Ann Beatty • April 4, 2025
Sparks Bristol is a collaborative community project initially envisioned by The Global Goals Centre, (GGC) more of which below. A few years ago, GGC took over an empty Marks and Spencer store and that’s how Sparks was born. Sparks is a department store with a difference, co-created by Global Goals Centre and Artspace Lifespace. On the ground floor is a huge range of shops, installations, events and more. Upstairs is a hub for local artists, it offers affordable studios as well as rehearsal and performance space. The Global Goals Centre is a Bristol-based educational charity inspired by the Sustainable Development Goals. (SDGs). GGC believe the SDG’s or Global Goals as they are sometimes known, can be reached, with imaginative solutions and widespread education and engagement. They work with partners to promote creative solutions and deliver ground breaking projects that work towards these ambitious goals. The Steve Sinnott Foundation supported the Global Goals Centre with seed funding when it first started over 5 years ago. This month we went to visit them to see how they are getting on and we were taken aback by the volume of work they have achieved since they started. It is amazing to see how though working together with other local community groups it has grown into the vibrant centre it is today. All of the creative projects they host are linked to the SDGs. They cover topics that tackle poverty, education, climate change, fashion recycling and upcycling, to name a few.

Spring is Here! Looking Ahead!

By Ann Beatty • March 28, 2025
Spring is definitely here, daffodils, blossom and crocuses are all basking in the bright sunshine. There is still a chill in the air in the shade but it's happening and all the seeds that were sown over the last few months are coming to fruition. At the Foundation, we have been planning the year ahead and our Positive Periods and Prevention of Gender Based Violence programmes got underway this weekend in Haiti and Ghana. These projects will have a long-lasting effect on the lives of the women and girls who take part: tackling the root causes of gender-based violence and enabling girls to attend school every day when they have their period, to feel safe at school and know how to take action when they are faced with violence. These are the first of many projects planned for the year ahead as we continue to work towards Education for All children everywhere.