Children's Holiday Venture (CHV) is a recognised society of Edinburgh University and the UK's only fully student-run children's charity. It works with 120 children from socially deprived areas of Edinburgh such as Niddrie, Bingham, Pilton, Craigmillar, Granton and Muirhouse.
The society, which has been running since 1963, aims to give these children the support, time and fun that they need. They do this by regularly taking the children out swimming with student volunteers as well as on day trips which are intended to be educational and fun.
CHV works with children referred by teachers and social workers. They are children who will benefit from the individual attention provided. CHV offer a supportive framework through regular long-term contact and a child to student ratio of 3:2. This enables the children to develop self-confidence through individual interaction and encourages them to express themselves as individuals and within a group situation.
There are over eighty volunteers, the majority of whom are students at the University of Edinburgh, although they welcome all those who are interested. Two groups of student volunteers operate each Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday evening. This allows each student group to work on an alternate weekly basis with older and younger children.
The administration is managed by a committee of fourteen, who meet on a weekly to fortnightly basis. CHV is a fully constituted society affiliated to the Edinburgh University Students' Association Societies' Centre.
The areas the children come from have a higher incidence of unemployment, poorer housing and more limited facilities compared with the Edinburgh average (2001 Census).
Building on the contact of regular swimming nights, CHV ensures that each group of children has either a day trip or a weekend camp every term. The weekend camps, which account for over 30% of overall expenditure, are held at outdoor centres throughout Scotland. Activities include going to the beach, karting, farm visits, midnight forest walks, highland trips, craftwork, sledging, falconry and lots of silly games.
Edinburgh University Children's Holiday Venture is a registered charity, No. SC007496 and is regulated by the Youth Scotland Area Association and Affiliated Clubs and the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator.
Famous quotes containing the words children, holiday and/or venture:
“In time of war you know much more what children feel than in time of peace, not that children feel more but you have to know more about what they feel. In time of peace what children feel concerns the lives of children as children but in time of war there is a mingling there is not children’s lives and grown up lives there is just lives and so quite naturally you have to know what children feel.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“I can’t stand to sing the same song the same way two nights in succession, let alone two years or ten years. If you can, then it ain’t music, it’s close-order drill or exercise or yodeling or something, not music.”
—Billie Holiday (1915–1959)
“If I venture to displace ... the microscopical speck of dust... on the point of my finger,... I have done a deed which shakes the Moon in her path, which causes the Sun to be no longer the Sun, and which alters forever the destiny of multitudinous myriads of stars.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)