Giving Back
Discovery Summer is committed to sharing its success in supporting educational projects around the globe. Here are some of the projects to date:
Discovery Summer is supporting Alsama, a charity that provides vital education to teenagers and women refugees in Lebanon. Funds raised will provide educational and enrichment opportunities for students who are due to graduate high school in 2026 and hope to go to university.
DS Alsama
Discovery Summer's collaboration with Alsama ('sky/hope' in Arabic) began during Covid lockdown in May 2020 when we launched a pro bono online English programme for 200 Syrian refugee children in three camps in Lebanon (Shatila, Burj & Bekaa).
Over 6 months, 15 Discovery Summer teachers delivered virtual lessons from their homes from as far apart as Australia, Greece, Spain, Portugal and the UK. The children and young adults made incredible progress, gaining invaluable skills to communicate in English with the outside world - hence opening up exciting new educational opportunities for their futures.
2024 Fundraising
In 2024 our students raised £2530 for Alsama during the summer. Each centre donated the profits from their tuck shop as well as funds raised by selling student magazines and artwork. Discovery Summer match funded this amount so a total of £5060 was donated to the refugee education charity.
The donation was used to fund technology and data packages to enable education to continue during the 2024 conflict when students were displaced.
Find out more at alsamaproject.com
Fundraising at Discovery Summer
Discovery Summer students take part in ambitious charity fundraising efforts each summer. At some centres they organise traditional English summer fairs, others donate proceeds from their tuck shop or produce magazines to sell to parents. The funds raised are then matched by Discovery Summer.
Give hope. Offer new horizons. Empower young people.
It is a real pleasure to see the Alsama children and young women so committed to learning English. They turn up on time with their homework done. The teachers from the Discovery Summer school are fantastic. They get the best out of each student.
- Kadria Hussien, Director, Alsama Centre Shatila
Discovery Summer has funded the building of a Primary and a Junior High School for 1000+ children in Freetown, Sierra Leone in conjunction with ACTIONAID. Rising Academies are now supporting further educational development in the schools.
Kola Tree Community School
Discovery Summer funded the construction of a Primary and Junior High schools for 800+ children in Freetown, Sierra Leone, in conjunction with ActionAid
2022 Update
Discovery Summer has now invited Rising Academies to work with the Principals to improve the governance, curriculum and to work with the team of teachers to raise quality. The aim is to encourage both girls and boys to stay on for secondary education, and to make sure that they develop the thinking skills necessary to take them on to further education and an exciting career path.
Through great curriculum, intensive teacher coaching and actionable data, Rising Academies help teachers and school leaders bring quality to every classroom. And it works: independent studies show Rising students make more than twice the progress of their peers in comparable schools.
School Project - Freetown, Sierra Leone
Discovery Summer is proud to have rebuilt the Kola Tree Community Primary School, in September 2010, with ActionAid as partners to oversee the project locally.
Two years later a much-needed Junior High School was built in the same compound. They now have a total of 12 classrooms, an administration building for staff, a library, two separate wells for fresh drinking water - and girls' and boys' toilets. Over 800 children how receive education that they would otherwise have been denied. And the school is getting good results each year in the Government exams.
Due to the success of the schools, land encroachment became a problem, so we recently supported the community further by building a perimeter wall around the school compound. This ensures the safety and wellbeing of all the children attending the schools.
Community Response
Making a statement on behalf of the community, the community development committee chairperson Mama Fatu Sesay, highlighted how the school started:
"Today is the happiest day in my life. For a very long time, we never had a school in this community. Children used to attend school in other communities. In the early 90s one mission set up a church in an unfinished building in the community. After some negotiations with the mission we were allowed to use the building as a non-formal school. We started with 30 children and were running the school from community contributions. We also hired one teacher. The mission attempted to take over the running of the school but could not continue because of lack of funds. So the school closed down in 1994.
Around 1995, CADO, with support from ActionAid, came and trained community animators on the use of participatory tools. Using these tools, we all came to an agreement that the school was our priority need. We took over an old poultry shed and set up a second school. We had many challenges such as the lack of furniture and learning materials. Children were asked to come with benches from their homes. This time, we employed two trained and qualified teachers because the number was increasing and we wanted to gain recognition from the Government. The school suffered another setback when the rebels attacked in 1999; the school was completely vandalised and the head teacher killed. We had to close again. We were able to start all over again in 2000 when ActionAid supported us with construction, teaching and learning materials. Since then we started pushing for government recognition and support. The other serious problem we had was the non availability of land for school construction. We had to organise ourselves as community people and met the Minister of Lands who later gave us a portion of land where this school stands today.
I nearly burst into tears when ActionAid in 2009 said they had secured funding for the construction of the first school in my community. Now that both schools are completed I feel very proud because all our efforts for the past years have yielded fruit. Our children can now access free and quality education. As a member of the School Management Committee, we will monitor the teachers so that they can teach the children well, as well as ensuring that all children in this community go to school. We are going to work with the councillor and chief to see that this happens. Thanks to ActionAid and Discovery Summer for the wonderful opportunity given to this community."
Discovery Summer was thrilled to offer full residential scholarships to Ukrainian teenagers who travelled to England in summer 2023. These teenagers have been living under extremely difficult conditions in their home country. The remark they made which resonates with us still is how wonderful it was to sleep in silence throughout the night.