Ace Outdoors Highlights (2009-2010) Part I
It's been an extremely busy time this past year at Ace Outdoors and this summer looks busier than even with a school holiday activities. Here's a rough guide to the high points of the year so far...just in case you're interested!
In November '09, we commissioned a specialist vegan web design agency based in Leeds to start to drive forward the development of our own web company site. Over the past few months we drew together images of all the activities and put together the final touches to the site. This project took six months of hard work .The official launch of the site was during National Vegetarian Week' May '10. Our web site contains all our latest offers, course dates and activity information. www.ace-outdoors.co.uk/offers.htm.
New ace outdoors website!
Whilst working on this project, we gained trade mark registration with the Vegan Society http://www.vegansociety.com/hubpage.aspx?id=677086&terms=vegan+holiday
and started to offer membership offers through our adverts in the societies magazine. We continue to support the society, in all of its work to raise awareness of animal welfare and vegan living.In January '10, we were visited by AALA (Adventure Activities Licensing Authority), and were granted a licence to provide activities for youth groups. We have now been working with a range of local education authorities to provide outdoor education for school children.
February, 10 saw the company start to develop a range of positive activities for young people to help them to, "Get-out on Rock". The project enabled twenty-four young people to experience learning to climb indoors on Friday nights, before moving out to climb on real rock in Snowdonia and with a second group in the Peak District. These activities took place from February all the way through to the end of April 2010.
Later in the month, we headed out to the French Alps to start to prepare for the Winter part of the International Mountain Leaders Award Assessment. The week enables us to explore the area where the assessment would take place and gain a greater understanding of snowshoeing and the alpine winter environment and wildlife.
March'10, Pete returned to France to complete the final assessment in the IML Scheme. After a week of assessment on all aspects of the Winter part of the syllabus, Pete successfully passed the winter test. This is a huge accomplishment, as it now means that we are able to offer summer and winter trekking holidays in Europe and beyond!
Whilst over in France, we were able to have meetings with a number of chalet owners in the area to view their properties and negotiate the use of their facilities. On returning back to the UK we have secured our agreements to offer vegetarian and vegan snow shoe holidays, for the winter season in 2011.
April' 10, saw Ace again receive another commissioned project, to undertake a large scale project to work with fifteen primary schools across a large cluster to provide them with, mapping of each school site, high quality coaching and after school clubs for pupils to take part in for up to four weeks.
Ace was able to draw on our experience to provide each school with a dedicated after school coach, a school orienteering map, teaching training for staff and supporting materials. Each school, was provided with just over seven and half hours of coaching time to make up the overall 112 hours of contact time across the piece.
Children who regularly came to all the extra-curricular clubs would also be able to gain the National Navigation Award- Young Star Silver Navigation Award. Over the project 210 children took part in the scheme and acheived this award. A competition event will be held sometime next year to continue our involvement with the schools.
End of Part One
