CHALLENGES held its first public event on Sunday, 23 September 2007.

The half-day Journalism workshop was held with the support of MBPJ, Local Agenda 21 Petaling Jaya, at one of the seminar rooms at the MBPJ headoffice in Jalan Yong Shook Lin, Petaling Jaya.

The 14 participants coming with different needs and diverse background were introduced to Basics in Journalism by Daniel Chan, ex-NST news editor.

Graphic designer Kevin Thomas added some colour to the session with Basic Principles in Design and Layout.

Petra Gimbad, Sun Columnist then shared her experience on Writing for the media.

This was followed by a practical writing session facilitated by Kevin Thomas, Petra Gimbad, Yasmin Masidi and Janatharni Arumugam.

Joanne Cheah, a supporting friend volunteered her services as deaf interpreter for the deaf participants.

 Based on the outcome of this workshop, I can safely say, we have writing talents amongst our disability community just waiting to be revealed!

So to all you participants, carry on writing .

Don’t let the words stop flowing…

To the speakers, facilitators, volunteers; to Mr Lee Lih Shyan and his staff at MBPJ; to my emcee Cheryl Mohan – Thank you to all of you who had helped to make this workshop a reality and success for the participants.  

Sorry, can’t reveal more than this. You canlook forward to reading about the event in CHALLENGES, the magazine soon!!  
Feedback from participants and supporting friends:

Good workshop Give more information on how to become a good journalist or columnist. From my view, session 1 and 2 gave a lot of information. Session 3 gives me spirit to become good writer – Dernita bt. Muhammed, participant

Time too short. A one-day workshop would be better for more aspects to be covered. Handouts would be useful. Bathmavathi Krishnan, participant 

Relevant, precise and speakers are experienced and good. It would be better to have refreshment and break. – _Elizabeth Ang, participant

Good and should continue (with) another workshop. Great speakers.-        Agnes Lee, supporting friend.

A very good, well-organised and interesting workshop. It helps all the different, diverse disabled ppl to be aware that writing is a good way to be heard, seen and push things forward.- Joanne Cheah , supporting friend

Good job! Happily learnt new things in the workshop. More sessions, pls. – Anthony Chong, participant  

This workshop was quite fun especially the design part and the writing for media part. It is good to meet the speakers and other people with disabilties because it is the first time I have seen so many such people. Perhaps the workshop can be longer because I feel we can learn more things. At the same time, thank you so much for organizing this workshop, I enjoyed myself!  Do organize another session!!! – James Chua Tuan Sek participant

The workshop was great!  I am not good in English grammer, so I (would) like to improve my English language. I hope that the workshop can be useful for the people with disabilities – Selina Ooi participant

Break between talks. Quite good. Good to have more   – Lee Sheng Yang participant

I am pleased and like to thank the organizer. Suggest that there should be good printouts of notes   – Anthony Lee Weng Choong, participant    

 Moses Choo, participant ; shares his thoughts via email: This is my first time attending a seminar or
workshop on writing.  I think it was good to start from the basics and listening to all the participants, I think we need plenty of
coaching before we are ready.  As I said, I have assumed responsibilities without any training, and like it or not we just have to
swim if we do not want to drown.  
Just a little note though, since we are talking about writing  and the fact that there was a talk about colours and formatting
 I thought it would be good to add in universal accessible documents.  The elderly and the young would need different  focus. Perhaps, we can talk a little about the needs of different target groups.  Older people will need bigger fonts and better contrast, especially with plain background.  Children need more colourful documents.  The blind, when using machines to read may require documents of less column  and preferably  less text inside a graphic.
 
Other than this suggestion, I think it was very well done and I think we can have more of such workshops, or even use such workshops
 to produce topics  and documents for the magazine.  When it is together, we think better and may give you  a wider prospect of things.
 
Regards,
 
Moses.
 

For pictures of the event, click here