Congratulations to Dr Kevin Harvey and Courtney Clarke, an English and History joint honours graduate (2020), for receiving Vice-Chancellor's Medals. You can read more about the awards here.
Courtney Clarke
In addition to maintaining her very high standards of academic work as part of her degree, Courtney’s charity work in Tanzania with MEDILIFE, has also been recognised by the University for this prestigious award. MEDILIFE is a charity which aims to provide medicine, education, and development initiatives to low income communities across Africa and South America, and Courtney has set up a branch at university, writing a mission statement, recruiting, motivating and training her team. She did this in conjunction with her work for another charity, PhabSoc, where, as external liaison officer, she organises trips out for vulnerable young people. Courtney is an inspiration to her fellow students and academic staff across the School.
Dr Kevin Harvey
The VC’s award has been given to recognise the wonderful work that Kevin has done to establish a range of initiatives to support community and dementia reading groups in Nottingham. Kevin’s own research area is in the field of applied discourse analysis, wellbeing and social inclusiveness and he has put this research into practice by setting up and running a series of dementia reading groups for School of English staff and student volunteers to get involved and read to residents of local care homes and hospitals. Kevin also helps run a weekly community reading group in Lenton based in the Thomas Helwys Baptist Church. Kevin’s work centres on reading out loud and the positive effect that this has on people with dementia, as well as bringing together older and socially-isolated people. Kevin is passionate about his work with the local care homes, and has built many relationships with the care home staff, the residents, and the students who volunteer each year.
Kevin also edits a dementia blog Dementia Day-to-Day, with the Institute of Mental Health with authors from all walks of life, each with their own lived experience of, and interest in, dementia - to explore the subject of ageing and wellbeing from as many angles as possible.
Posted on Friday 4th September 2020