A group of three 5th Year students from St Josephs College in Lucan, County Dublin, Ireland. As part of their Transition Year programme last year they took part in the Student Enterprise Awards, which takes place nationally every year. For this activity, their job is to set up a business from scratch and take part in a competition.
For their Student Enterprise Award, the business they set up is called ‘No Limits’. What they have done is to written fairy tales for children in which the protagonist has a disability or special need. They feel very strongly about the idea of equality in this area and that children with disabilities or special needs are under-represented in children’s literature. Their aim is to improve this issue in our society.
They have written two books, ‘Wonder Wheels’ and ‘Anna’s Amazing Aura’. ‘Wonder Wheels’ is about a superhero called Sam who is in a wheelchair and ‘Anna’s Amazing Aura’ is about a mermaid called Anna that has epilepsy. They have also written a third book entitled ‘A Royal Rescue’ which features a prince and princess, twins with Down Syndrome. This book will be available
in January. Their books are €7 each and they will also be giving 10% of the price of each of those books to the Down Syndrome Ireland Centre when it’s complete, as they are giving 10% of ‘Wonder Wheels’ to the Irish Wheelchair Association and 10% of ‘Anna’s Amazing Aura’ to Epilepsy Ireland.
They won their Regional Final of the Student Enterprise Awards represented South Dublin in the National Final in Croke Park in May. They also took part in the final 10 of the Griffith College National Enterprise Final last March. They also entered their project into the Young Social Innovators Programme last year and were lucky enough to win their category, Make Our World Fair and Just Challenge Award, one of only 11 awards in YSI. They were then eligible to compete for the Bronze, Silver or Gold YSI Award by performing a public Speak Out in May in the Convention Centre. They were fortunate enough to come second in this programme and took home the Silver Award. They were also selected by YSI to be part of the five groups in Ireland for their new Elevate Programme this year in which they are helping us develop our project even further!
They will be launching our third book, ‘A Royal Rescue’ which is about a prince and princess, twins with Down Syndrome, on Saturday the 20th of January 2018 in St Jospeh’s College in Lucan. The Minister of State for Disability, Finian McGrath will be officially launching the book on the day and it will be available to purchase for the first time on the day!
For more information;
https://www.facebook.com/events/716783365192824/?ti=icl
