MATTDOTCOM win National Award

MATTDOTCOM was revealed today as a winner of the Guardian Charity Awards 2005.  The Guardian Charity Awards, in association with NatWest and The Royal Bank of Scotland, seek to recognise small charities, with a budget of less than £1m that are making an outstanding contribution to social welfare at grassroots level in the UK. Each winner receives a cheque for £6,000 and a brand new PC from Smartchange.  The photographs show some of the team collecting their award at the Tate Modern from Jane Asher.  The judges said: “Many charities start like this: a family discovers a gap in services and realises there is a much bigger issue out there. We hope Mattdotcom goes on to develop its service to meet what is clearly a real need.”

We are working on helping all the teenagers we work with to have access to the internet.  If parents already have broadband coming into their homes and have a wireless hub we are supplying the teenagers with wireless adapters to make their laptop compatable with their family wifi system.  If the family only has the broadband connection we will lend the family a wifi system for the house.  At present we can only offer this latter service to teenagers with cancer.  All the new laptops we are buying have built in wifi connections or will have external wifi connections.

2008 has arrived and MattDotCom is pleased to say that we are continuiuing to lend out laptops to teenagers in Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire,  We have been saddened to hear of some teenagers who could have benefited but applications to us were never submitted.  Our latest laptops have internal wireless internet connections.  Whilst with most of our older equipment we have supplied the teenagers with a wireless stick.  We are still getting some teething problems with this as we at MattDotCom all learn more about how computers work.  Also all our teenagers get stick drives to move school/college/university work between them and their tutors.  For those who spend long or regular periods in hospital undergoing treatment the laptops play DVDs and CDs and have headphones supplied with them.  All new equipment weighs under 3 kgs so making it light enough to use when stuck in bed, be that in hospital or at home.

Information for professionals working with teenagers - if you have a teenager with cancer or another life threatening disease contact us for an application pack.

All of our teenagers now have their stick drives which came from the money from winning the Guardian Charity of the Year Award.  All teenagers we work with now get given two stick drives when we first meet them along with a set of headphones so as not to annoy ward sisters.

We are also in the process of ensuring that all our computers will access the internet view a wireless connection.  NB to do this in your home you or your parents will need a wireless router system.