RKdia Excellence Award

 RKdia Excellence Award.pdf
January 2006

A Big Win for Young People

Five years after launching Rkdia, a youth support and housing centre, Drum Housing Association is celebrating its success with the business community. Rkdia was named runner-up in The Business Excellence Awards Team of the Yearђ category. The awards are held annually by Portsmouths daily newspaper, The News.

A record 160 entries were received for ґTeam of the Year from businesses across the community. Rkdia shone through on a night dominated by commercially driven enterprise. Their team of five staff and three volunteers run a commercial catering and business conference operation from their Horndean location in order to help finance their supported housing for 16 і 25 year olds, run youth support groups, a community drop-in centre and organise social activities.

Rkdia is a forward thinking project that was launched by Drum in partnership with East Hampshire District Council and Hampshire County Youth service. The project has been supported with the help of lottery funding, which runs out next year. Their future is dependent on generating an income from their on-site caf, catering services, IT and meeting facilities. Under the leadership of Project Manager Chris Adams they have managed to achieve this and more.

Chris Adams said, I am immensely proud of the team I work with. We have made fantastic progress. We have to juggle commercial enterprise with the delivery of succesful support services for young people. The award is a tribute to our success in achieving that goal.铓

In their five years of operation Rkdia have provided youth support services to more than 2500 young people aged 13 25. Many of the management team have had to learn new business skills in order to make the commercial side of the operation work. The judges of the business awards were particularly impressed with the ability of the team to pull together and achieve both their business and youth programme objectives.