We’re delighted to announce that we will once again be working with Clúid Housing Association and Healthy Food for All over the coming months.
Clúid Housing Association develops and manages rented housing for people on low incomes and people with special needs. The Association also has a growing focus on managing regeneration projects. DHR Communications will be working with Clúid on the official opening of a regenerated housing estate in Mayo over the coming weeks. We last worked with the Association in March of this year, on the opening of the Castlebrook housing estate – a unique Traveller housing development – in Rathcoole, Co. Dublin.
Healthy Food for All (HFfA), meanwhile, is an all-Island, multi-agency initiative that seeks to combat food poverty by promoting access, availability and affordability of healthy food for low-income groups. DHR Communications will be working with HFfA over the next few weeks to promote a new guide for community food initiatives. We have also worked with HFfA in the past to highlight the health and dietary consequences of economic recession. Partners involved in the HFfA initiative include: the Department of Community, Equality and Gaeltacht Affairs; the Food Safety Authority of Ireland; the Health Service Executive, and safefood.
Further information on both of these events will be available through our Facebook page over the coming weeks.
August is meant to be a relatively quiet month for PR and public affairs, but DHR Communications has been busy working on a number of client projects. This week alone, we’ve had the launch of Active Retirement Ireland’s new website, www.activeirl.ie, with Eamon Ryan TD, Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources, and the publication of a report by Comhar Sustainable Development Council on how Ireland can enhance and develop its green infrastructure.
We also spent all day yesterday in Limerick, delivering the first day of a three-day training programme to representatives of the New Communities Partnership. The training focuses on building the media and advocacy skills of new community leaders, and follows on from the successful delivery of a similar training programme with participants in Dublin. We also delivered media training to Threshold last week.
Our work on the WebActivate project, meanwhile – which is supported by The Digital Hub – is ongoing: the project is currently focused on signing up small to medium-sized enterprises that would like to get their websites improved or even built from scatch, free of charge.
And in recent weeks, we’ve also worked on the launch of gosave.ie, a new saver card that will enable Irish consumers to save hundreds of euro each year and find the best-value deals within their local communities and nationwide. The gosave cards also provide a great opportunity for non-profit organisations to raise much-needed funds.
DHR Communications is one of the sponsors of the Irish Gospel Music Festival, which will take place on Saturday, 25th September, at the Convention Centre, Spencer Dock, North Wall Quay, Dublin 1.
The Festival – which is being organised by Metro Éireann – will feature some of the most talented Gospel musicians and singers from Ireland and abroad, including the Dublin Gospel Choir, Discovery Gospel Choir, Gospo Remix, Alva and more. A series of workshops will also take place, and will be open to anyone interested in gaining a better understanding of various aspects of gospel music. Workshop will include: the history and development of gospel music; music and integration; song-writing, and choreography.
The Irish Gospel Music Festival aims to celebrate and support gospel music of all kinds and cultures, encompassing choral, rap, African, church, R’n'B and other sounds of gospel. A website for the Festival is currently being developed – we will post the link and further details of the line-up as soon as they are available.
DHR Communications recently moved office. Having spent four years at 101 James’s Street, we have now moved on to 4 St. Catherine’s Lane West, to a lovely new office, complete within our own roof-top terrace and unbeatable views of Dublin City and the Dublin and Wicklow Mountains. Our new office is still located within The Digital Hub campus.
Officially, our new address is: 4 St. Catherine’s Lane West, Unit A, 4th Floor, The Digital Hub, Dublin 8. Our main telephone number remains the same: 01-4885808, as do all of our direct lines. A location map for our new office is available here.
Dermot, Lydia and Noomi at the meeting area in our new office
Catherine at her desk in our new office
View over Dublin City Centre from our roof-top terrace
The Chairperson of DHR Communications, Peter Cassells, was recently announced as the first Executive Director of the new Kennedy Centre for Conflict Intervention at NUI Maynooth. The Centre will open in 2011 and is being established in honour of the late Senator Edward Kennedy.
The Centre – the first of its kind in Ireland – will specialise in conflict resolution, mediation, leadership and civic engagement. It will be university-based, but will have a strong focus on engaging with key organisations – both national and international – that are active in these fields.
Initially, it will focus on peace-keeping and peace-making (for example, Northern Ireland; Ireland’s role in peacemaking; conflict resolution in the developing world), mediation, community conflict intervention and alternative dispute resolution (covering family law; commercial law, and workplace dispute resolution).
The Taoiseach announced the establishment of the Centre in recent weeks, saying it was further acknowledgement of Senator Kennedy’s immense commitment to Ireland, in particular his role in helping to bring about peace in Northern Ireland.
Our Chairperson, Peter, is highly experienced in conflict intervention and dispute resolution. Further details of his experience in these areas – and his career to date – are available here.
We’ve been quite busy for the pass few days with a number of client events. The Model recently played host to the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Tourism, Culture, Sport, Community, Equality and Gaeltacht Affairs and local politicians in the North West Region.
The Model also announced their Summer/Autumn programme. Highlights of the programme include a film on the DeLorean car, an exhibit by Jack B. Yates titled the Living Ginger and a concert by BellX1.
We assisted Money Point in their press announcement on why Ireland must do more to protect the general public from counterfeit notes. As a result we received coverage in both radio and print media. The story is online on the Irish Independent website.
We also assisted LGBT Diversity at their launch and received coverage in number of media. One such coverage is a story in the Irish Examiner.
Finally, Labour Party leader Eamon Gilmore TD played a visit to the Digital Hub to view the WebActive programme and meet with some companies located in the hub.
As mentioned a couple of weeks back, we were delighted to be chosen by the New Communities Partnership (NCP) to deliver a training programme for representatives of NCP member organisations, aimed at building their capacity in media and political advocacy skills. Full details of this training programme – entitled the ‘Leadership Programme for Community Leaders’ – have now been announced by the NCP.
Sponsored by the Community Foundation for Ireland, the programme is designed to foster, promote, and enhance ethnic minority involvement in local, regional and national policymaking fora in Dublin, Limerick and Cork. It will will provide training and mentoring to leaders of ethnic minority communities in Dublin, Limerick and Cork on influencing policy and social agendas.
Commenting on the programme, Issah Huseini, CEO of the New Communities Partnership, said: “The immigrant civil society are aware that they need to produce effective leaders in order to exert real influence in decision making processes in public life in Ireland. To achieve genuine and meaningful participation and representation in political arenas and not just ‘tokenistic’ representation, we need to provide leaders who can understand the mechanics of influencing policy and social agendas in an Irish context.”
The NCP is currently recruiting emerging, experienced, and advanced leaders from its network of over 106 members groups nationwide to participate in the training programme. At the end of the programme, participants will have acquired the skills and virtues they need to engage with the State, as well as other institutions in Irish society, and will be ready to work closely with Strategic/Joint Policy Committees in local authorities, statutory agencies, local government structures and other civil society fora.
Further details on the training programme are available here.
We’re delighted to announce we’ve been contracted by the New Communities Partnership (NCP) to deliver a capacity-building and training programme for regional representatives of the Partnership over the coming months. Our work will focus on equipping local members of the NCP with media and political advocacy skills, with a view to strengthening the voice of new communities at all levels of Irish life.
We’re also currently working with the Family Resource Centre National Forum (FRCNF) and the Family Support Agency (FSA) on the launch of a statistical report on the organisations’ work during 2009. This launch will take place in Dublin next Wednesday, 7th July, and will be followed by a political briefing event where representatives of Family Resource Centres from all over Ireland will meet their local TDs and Senators to fill them in on the statistical information of relevance to their area.
Finally, we’re in the process of putting together our training programme for autumn 2010: during September and October, DHR Communications will be offering great value training sessions in media skills and political advocacy, specifically focused at the not-for-profit and statutory sectors. Full details of our training programme will be announced over the coming weeks, so check back often for further updates or email info@dhr.ie to find out more!
We’ve had a number of client events in recent weeks, including yesterday’s launch of the 2009 Annual Report of the Dublin Well Woman Centres, which has been receiving high levels of media coverage for the past few days (to see a report of the launch on yesterday’s lunchtime news on RTÉ 1 Television, click here).
Last week, we organised a conference on ‘How People Live Their Lives in an Intercultural Society’ on behalf of the Irish Committee of the European Cultural Foundation (ECF), at which President Mary McAleese delivered the keynote address. A report was launched at the event, documenting the outcomes and recommendations arising from a two-year-long project, facilitated by DHR Communications, whereby the ECF brought together a cross-section of people – from different cultural backgrounds and living in six different parts of the country – to discuss their experiences of interculturalism.
We’ve also been busy processing the applications for the Comhar Sustainable Development Media Fund over the past couple of weeks. Thirty-one applications were received in total, from journalists and organisations interested in carrying out projects aimed at increasing awareness of sustainability issues. The judging meeting for the Fund will take place over the coming weeks, and all applicants will be notified of the outcomes before the end of July.
Finally, the overall winner of The Digital Hub’s Best in Show competition was announced last week: congratulations to the team of DCU graduates that won the top prize of €1,000, as well as work placements with Red Diamond Media. Full details of the winning team and the competition overall – which is targeted at up-and-coming digital media creatives – are available here.
