We were very saddened to hear of the recent death of Robin Rowland, an active patron of TME and the founder of Global Links Intitiative (GLI). Through GLI, Robin and his team have linked us to some great collaborative partnerships with grassroots organisations in various parts of the world.
Robin was one of our first supporters and a wonderful patron - always willing to help us. He will be greatly missed.

Well done to Samantha (Shuang Yang), our student representative at Warwick University, who recently won the Warwick Volunteers Gold Award for her help and support to TME.
Samantha has been a great help to us, particularly in organising Chinese students to help with translating and recording our DVD lessons. She has also done several translations and recordings herself.

On Friday we met with a group of students from Atlantic College in Wales, with a view to them helping us with translations and recordings. One of our Associates put us in touch with the Principal of Atlantic College some time ago and he has always said he is very keen to get their students involved in what we’re doing - primarily because they have students from around 80 different countries. All the students are aged between 16-18 and are very self-motivated - many of them being on scholarships, so it would be great to tap into this resource.
Being a Friday afternoon we were very pleased that around 20 students showed up to meet us, representing quite a range of languages. We’re hopeful that some translations and recordings will come out of the link and, to facilitate this, we have left a mini recording device with one of the first year students from South America. She has kindly agreed to be project coordinator on campus for us. Another interesting potential outcome of this link is that many of the students do a summer project overseas (some of them returning to their own countries) and have expressed keenness to take DVD lessons with them when they go.

This past week has seen a flurry of translations coming in, which is all the more exciting as we’re mainly concentrating our efforts at the moment on “re-mastering” in-house our 28 lessons to date and there hasn’t been much time for encouraging translations. Many thanks to everyone who is helping us with this essential task - but we’d like to say a special thank you to Mr Karunamoy Sen, from North Wales, who has just sent back his 15th Bengali lesson translation! This is a record for the amount of translations done by one of our Associates - and a fantastic help.

Community Action Network (CAN), who brokered our link with Panasonic last year, invited us to meet with David Gibson, Panasonic's People Development Manager, to discuss how last year's programme went and to talk about linking up again this year. Last year 2 of their staff were each given 6 days to help us look at scaling up our marketing/distribution efforts in India and South Africa. As a result they produced detailed reports – parts of which we hope to implement in the near future. We are keen to collaborate again (particularly as this service is offered to us free of charge!), so the next step is for us to propose several different tasks, with firm ideas of output needed, for David to match up with a couple of members of his team. The project is expected to run from June for about 6 months.