Welcome!

Open Hearts Open Minds is your social inclusion e-learning centre, keeping you in touch with essential news, tips & tools to help you to tackle social exclusion.

Created by & for people at all levels in Devon's voluntary & statutory services,  its your easy way to understand more about who's affected by social exclusion and find help to work more inclusively.  It's a chance too for you to share what you know makes a difference - contact us and we'll spread the word in our e-news service.

Sign Up for our free e-news service!  and each month you'll receive bite-size instalments of the latest facts and ideas (with no pop-up ads). Look right and click on the Sign-Up orange button now!

What's the attraction??!!  You'll find it easy to learn with our:

  • News - insights into how deprivation, discrimination and disadvantage affect people's lives in Devon, and how you can work to tackle this
  • Top Tips - a growing collection of bright ideas from our readers offering simple ways of working more inclusively
  • Exercises - developed with a cross section of our readers, to help you understand how social inclusion relates to your role - whatever it is.  These user friendly tools will help you gain the skills to reduce the effects of social exclusion in your community through the way you deliver your service
  • Useful Links - to websites where you can drill into more detail on our A - Z of social inclusion themes from Ageism to Youth Exclusion  
  • The Library - food for thought from our growing collection of e-news articles, categorized under themes, like Disability, Gender Equality, Gypsies and Travellers, Lesbian Gay Bi-sexual and Trans, Mental Health, Migrants and Refugees, Poverty, Rural Issues etc... 
  • Images - pictures we've found to illustrate diversity and the effects of isolation, deprivation or discrimination.
  • Screencast - Hear how you can get behind the jargon around social exclusion to find the real people it's all about, and make a difference to their lives....   Use this as a refresher for yourself, or maybe as an Induction resource for staff

 

This is service is designed for you, whether social inclusion is written into your job description or not! 
(Our growing e-learning community of people like you includes Customer Service Staff, Project Officers, Clerks, Managers, Specialist Community Workers, Policy Makers, Councillors, Health Practitioners, Social Workers, Teachers, Fire Fighters.. you name it! )


Here's some of the great feedback readers give us from the results of our reader survey conducted in Feb 08!

  • I really like the top tips - gives me something to think about or a new tool to use immediately.
  • It's easy to read, not too much on a page but with the promise of much more with just the click of a mouse!
  • I think the resources are very useful and can be used in a variety of ways in many different groups
  • Feels like it's our community newsletter because it gives us the opportunity to be interactive with what's on the site and share with other people
  • Part of the beauty of this site is that there are surprises - things I would not have expected to find but that are useful
  • Impressive and accessible web site
  • Thanks for providing this excellent service


Spread the news!    Tell others about this great free learning opportunity with a hyperlink to Open Hearts Open Minds from your website.  Just click on this 28kB rotating gif image and save it to your pictures folder.  Then upload it to your site and make it a hyperlink - your page will look groovier for it !!

Or, circulate this eye-catching flyer!