Youth charity the Jon Egging Trust (JET) has renewed its partnership with Northrop Grumman for the tenth consecutive year.
Northrop Grumman has committed once again to part-fund the delivery of JET’s STEM-inspired youth support programmes across all of JET’s active regions in the UK for the 23-24 academic year, including Hampshire, Lincolnshire, Wiltshire, Oxfordshire, East Anglia, North Wales, West Midlands, Cornwall and Dorset. This will amount to over 26,000 hours of face-to-face support delivered to over 5,000 students.
Last year, Northrop Grumman’s partnership enabled JET to work with over 2,000 students - including 208 via its flagship three-year Blue Skies programmes - delivering over 7,000 hours of face-to-face support,
In addition, since 2017, Northrop Grumman have enabled JET students to travel to Huntsville, Alabama, to take part in the week-long Space Camp USA. This year, four JET students were selected for the summer camp, including 15-year-old Ben*, a Blue Skies student from Hampshire.
He said: “I had a fear of flying and I had never been on a residential or stayed away from home but thankfully with the skills I learnt from the JET sessions, I was able to overcome my fears and the challenges thrown at me and have one of the best weeks of my life! I met astronauts, rocket scientists and got to experience all the different simulators. My dream job is to become an aerospace engineer at NASA and after this I think I might get there.”
JET’s partnership with Northrop Grumman began in 2014, when Northrop Grumman engineers based at RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire, helped to deliver JET’s local Blue Skies programmes, acting as professional role models and providing workplace experiences for students.
JET CEO, Dr Emma Egging comments: “Over the past decade, Northrop Grumman have grown to become one of our key corporate partners, not only supporting us with direct funding without which we would not be able to deliver our support programmes to young people from disadvantaged backgrounds who so desperately need a boost, but also supporting us in many unseen ways too; lending us office-space when we need to host events, hosting us at key industry events such as the Royal International Air Tattoo to allow us to grow our corporate network, and advocating for us at the very highest level. We are enormously grateful to Nick Chaffey and the whole team at Northrop for their continued support.”
Nick Chaffey, chief executive of Northrop Grumman UK said: “As a long-time partner of JET, we are delighted to continue our partnership into 2024. We have deep roots across the UK and a passion to help young people continue their education and grow in confidence through the wonders of science and engineering. Our close relationship with JET not only transforms young lives but also demonstrates our commitment to generating long-term prosperity in the UK.”
