Our journey

10 October 2019DigiLocal is officially recognised as an independent charity by the Charity Commission.
13 June 2019We’re always keen to support under represented groups into technology, and Skirting Science are doing a fantastic job at opening career awareness for young women.
June 2019Earlier in the year, 7 teams of young people from DigiLocal submitted short python code snippets to the Mission Zero challenge as part of the Astro Pi initiative.

In June we were able to award them with their official certificates!		https://digilocal.org.uk/2019/07/23/mission-success/
16 & 18 April 2019Working in partnership with Youth Moves & Community of Purpose we provided 2 days of coding experience for young people as part of their Break Free holiday club tackling food poverty in South Bristol.
8 December 2018DigiLocal Celebration at Barton Hill Settlement. As well as our usual celebration of young people’s achievements, we also welcomed Peaches Golding (Lord Lieutenant of Bristol) to share in our celebration.
19 September 2018A new partnership began with Filton Avenue Primary School. With two campuses we started at their Lockleaze Road campus and now support a club at their Orchard Campus.
7 July 2018DigiLocal had a fantastic representation at the 2018 BAFTA Young Games Designer competition. This event draws many thousands of entries from young people across the UK. Anish was one of our young people that made the finals for the Game Concept (10-14) category. I was also nominated as Mentor of the Year, which was a huge honour!
Sept 2017 – May 2018DigiLocal hosted a team of University of Bristol undergraduate physics students working on their industrial placement. Our challenge to them was to develop a series of games that would take the young people on a space flight to Mars! Everyone had a fantastic time, and the students were able to show that not only were their resulting games great fun, the young people were also learning core physics concepts!
28 June 2018Celebrating their 10th Anniversary Year, the annual Skirting Science event is always a highlight of the STEM calendar.
10 March 2018DigiLocal Celebration this time kindly hosted by Redmaids’ High School. A large part of what we do is celebrate the achievement of our young people. This was also the launch of our first challenge for young people to enter the BAFTA Young Games Designer competition!
11 January 2018Heading back to Weston super Mare, we launched our third club with a school, partnering with Windwhistle Primary School and XTND.
11 January 2018DigiLocal exists to support under represented groups within the technology industry. We launched our club with Andalusia Academy (an Islamic girl’s school) in Bristol to further that support.
10 January 2018Continuing our support for the St Pauls area of Bristol, we launched a club with the Malcolm X Community Centre. Unfortunately this didn’t last long term, but a couple of the young people now attend Docklands Youth Project.
October 2017Our partnership with South Gloucestershire Libraries expanded substantially with three clubs specifically hosted by South Gloucestershire Library service. Yate, Staple Hill, and Filton Library clubs all began in early October 2017 (Yate actually started in Nov).
1 July 2017A large part of what we do with DigiLocal is celebrate the achievement of young people. Our first DigiLocal Celebration brought together young people from almost all our clubs! We also welcomed Tim Bowles (West of England Mayor) to join our celebration.
29 June 2017The annual Skirting Science event took place again, and we were very proud to be invited to participate.
1 February 2017Our second club with Bristol City Libraries was with Bedminster. We actually support two clubs here, the library run CodeClub on a Monday use our laptops, and then our own DigiLocal @ Bedminster runs on Wednesday.
28 January 2017We joined with Scratch4Kids to help run a small coding activity at Bradley Stoke Library. Since then we expanded the club when Leo moved to a different venue and now have 2 sessions with 10 young people in each session!
13 January 2017We’ve worked with a number of libraries and in Jan of 2017 we began workin g with Shirehampton Library. They already had a successful CodeClub but needed help with sustaining the club and finding volunteers. We were able to help and Shirehampton has gone from strength to strength and now hosts 10 young people in the Public Hall.
11 January 2017Continuing our support for Weston super Mare, we launched a club with Weston Works. This was in a very challenging part of WsM and ultimately didn’t work out. We did have some very engaged young people but weren’t able to establish sufficiently regular attendance to warrant a full club.
9 January 2017We launched our first club with a Primary School in partnership with Summerhill Academy.
September 2016We hosted special 1 day taster sessions for South Gloucestershire Libraries in Sept 2016 as part of their Discover Week. We visited Winterbourne, Staple Hill, Downend, Emmerson’s Green libraries. This was the start of our very successful collaboration with South Gloucestershire Library Service that continues to this day.
23 June 2016As part of supporting more women into technology, we were excited to provide a workshop with the Soroptimist International (Great Britain & Ireland) and their award winning Skirting Science fair.

We’ve continued to support this fantastic initiative each year.
7 June 2016We started a club with The Hive in Weston super Mare as an experiment in working with business venues. While the club worked well, the lack of a strong community around the venue, it proved unsustainable in the long term.
3 May 2016We launched our club with Full Circle @ Docklands as part of the St Pauls Settlement. This was our first club in partnership with another youth project and has proven a great success. This club runs slightly differently as young people register with the youth club, and we operate an open door for anyone within the club that would like to try coding. We now have half a dozen young people come to DigiLocal and stay for the rest of the youth activities!
19 April 2016We launched our first club in partnership with a school, Redmaids’ High School. As an all-girls school this was a great opportunity to support a very under-represented group within technology industry.
20 June 2015First club session of DigiLocal held at Barton Hill Settlement. Working closely with the Bristol Somali Resource Centre we began with 10 laptops and an empty room. Things picked up quickly and Barton Hill is still one of our most popular clubs.
29 January 2015A jointly hosted immersion event between HBB (High Tech Bristol & Bath CIC) and the Skills Hub at the West of England Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) produced many ideas, including the blueprint for what would become DigiLocal. At this stage, DigiLocal was a project within HBB.