Improving digital education opportunities between street art and pubs

Amazon's UK headquarters are located in the middle of London's hip artist district Shoreditch. An international Amazon Future Engineer (AFE) workshop was held there in February. Since the launch of the educational initiative – which is especially aimed at socially disadvantaged children, teenagers and young adults – HeadlineAffairs has not only been handling communications around the program, but also providing support in terms of project management and development.

In this role, I traveled to London for two days with the AFE Germany team and worked with program managers from various countries to further develop the initiative and its services. This included virtual classroom discussions with Amazon IT experts – the so-called “Class Chats” – as well as virtual visitor tours through Amazon fulfillment centers, showing how IT, technology and people work together to make our orders possible.

During the many intensive working group sessions and good discussions around the central question “How do we achieve the greatest impact?” the participants' heads were spinning. The fresh air breaks in bright sunshine on the terrace of the headquarters on the 14th floor with a view over the city were therefore a real relief – as was the cold cider in the evening in one of the many corner pubs in Shoreditch.

My personal conclusion: Education knows no boundaries. Few things motivate and inspire me more than working to improve the educational opportunities of the next generation. That's why it fills me with pride that we as an agency are a part of this project, which is so important to society.