JANUARY

Happy New Year! From everyone at Choose a Challenge HQ, we’re wishing you all a joyful and adventurous 2020. We hope you use the new decade to usher in renewed positivity, happiness, and of course, continued great work for the awesome causes you’ve all done a cracking job at helping so far.

We’ve a good feeling about 2020, and we hope you do too.

CELEBRATING YOU

Challenge Leader(s) of the Month

Cliona Collins / Lana Merkusheva / Jamie Cross / Connor O’Driscol - University College Cork

It’s almost criminal the little amount of praise that the team over at Cork get; the work they’ve put in since late 2018 is nothing short of exceptional. From a few budding adventurers spotting an advert on social media, keen to get started with something new in their academic year, to three successful challenges fully integrated into one of the biggest societies on campus - and all in the space of a year! Not only that, but the leaders’ stewardship is cracking; constantly getting the team out on the road on training hikes and group fundraisers. Keep it up team!

Independent Leader of the Month

James Young - University of Aberystwyth (Mount Kilimanjaro)

Aberystwyth might not seem like the likeliest of places for a challenge team, but with a leader like James anything can happen! We had so many unlikely success stories from the recruitment period we’re still getting through the rounds of praise… James was able to recruit 16(!) participants for the Kilimanjaro Trek, despite the obvious difficulty of Aberystwyth being a smaller university aboding far from civilisation.

COMING UP…

STRATEGY DAY 2020

EXCITING NEWS. The venue and sessions for our annual Strategy Day have been announced! We’ll be hosting the day at The Heist Bank in Paddington, a space complete with retro board games, a Nintendo 64, free food, and of course unlimited coffee! Sessions will include a review of the 2019 Autumn recruitment period, RAG-led sessions, as well as a beefy session on our 2020 strategy! You can find the Facebook event here. If you haven’t already, please RSVP here. You’re welcome to bring three delegates from your University/RAG. If you’d like to bring more, please pop Felix a line.

ILM Accreditation

Applications for the ILM accreditation closed a couple of weeks back. However, there seems to have been some confusion in that the accreditation was perceived to be the Challenge Leader role itself. The accreditation is collaborative between both Choose a Challenge and the Institute of Leadership and Management. It’s an awesome opportunity to quantify the awesome work you all do as Challenge Leaders, so it works wonders for LinkedIn and your future job applications.

Because of the confusion, we’ve extended the application deadline to Monday 20/01 at 11:59pm - you can apply here. We’ll be in touch with successful applicants by the end of next week.

If you’re not yet sold, 100% of previous learners agree that:

1. the accreditation is beneficial to their wider role as Challenge Leader;

2. the accreditation is manageable and achievable;

3. they would recommend the accreditation to other Challenge Leaders.

FROM THE OFFICE…

CHOOSE A KART!

This week the team headed to TeamSport Go-Karting in London to exercise our competitive edges after the busy recruitment season. In a heated contest, Felix topped the first 12-minute race and started in pole position for the final Grand Prix. However after some foul play he was ‘black flagged’ and Stephen, Dan, and Charles were able to snatch the pole positions - with Stephen topping the lot, congrats Stephen!

You can read more about our staff and their roles here.