Friday 6 March 2009

Brook Awards

Last night we held out second annual awards dinner celebrating excellence in young people's sexual health work.  In the face of often challenging work - sometimes described as a thankless task - we took the opportunity to celebrate all that is amazing about the courage, determination and innovation across the UK.

In my introductory speech I set out my ongoing commitment to the teenage pregnancy strategy, the chlamydia target and the GUM targets.   And I also identified the need to view targets with sensible and strategic 'contempt' because without that they have the ability to distort our perspective and driving our efforts away from people to tick boxes.  

All the shortlisted nominees deserve the recognition, congratulation, applause and cheers they received last night, and special congratulations to the winners.  Details of the winners is on our website www.brook.org.uk, along with the link to the our annual conference (which took place on the same day) podcast.

And to my team and the conference organisers, NSA, who made the event run with smoothly thank you - you were brilliant.  Super stars of the evening were three young people -  PJ, Remiiidy and Kris with what is set to be a best selling single - use a condom - truly truly brilliant.

And thank you to Matt Rawle (hope you win the Olivier award this weekend) for hosting the evening, Tracey Cox, Jasmine Lowson and Zoe Margolis, our Brook ambassadors, and Karen Turner from Department of Health for presenting the awards and contributing so brilliantly to the evening.

Final thank you to our sponsors and supporters.  Another night that I got into bed very very tired and went to sleep with a smile on my face, feeling lucky and proud to work for Brook. 



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