Apparently in Italy touching your bits in public is now illegal. It made me smile because I wonder what they’d make of the tendency of some lads recently to walk around with their hands stuffed down the front of their pants!

In a landmark judgement with far-reaching social implications, Italy’s highest appeals court has ruled it is a criminal offence for Italian men to touch their genitals in public.

The judges of the court of cassation stressed that the ban did not just apply to brazen crotch-scratching, but also to what might be termed superstitious pre-emption.

Link to article here

Film from the recent training with Donegal Youth Council in Ireland

Its a constant challenge for people working with young people in projects and activities to be able to prove the value of what they’re doing - especially if many of those benefits are in so called ’soft skills’ - things like confidence, working relationships, being organised etc.

They’re called soft skills but they’re towards the top of the list of things that employers look for, so they’re very important. We had the same issue for our Apprentice Trainer Programme - if you speak to the young people involved with that many of them will talk about all sorts of benefits the experience had for them - but we never had any way of measuring this - even the research that was done on the programme doesn’t really give a true picture.

A main feature of our Prospective resource is the process of linking up young peoples skills and interests with other peoples needs. Prospective ends with young people identifying various’ actions’ they would like to take, and these Actions can be group or individual actions. The Outline resource includes ‘Personal Record Cards’ - these are things we developed because we recognised that many youth workers weren’t taking advantage of the opportunities available during a project to help young people develop personally - there was a tendency to just see it as a ‘group thing’. So we developed Personal Record Cards to allow young people to give themselves Continue Reading »

Heres a film of some adults from all over the UK who took part in a training course in Nottingham. The training aims were to provide guidance, practical ideas and resources to the adults who work with young people in sport, to guide them along a pathway to participation, volunteering and leadership. undefined

Short film with two groups from the Youth Act programme who took part in some YoMo training at Hebden Bridge. One group is intending to raise awareness about crime and the other hopes to challenge the negative image of young people.

Its taken us years to develop our courses and the resources we use. One of the things I’ve been working towards for some time is to be able to ‘package up’ our training so that other people/organisations can deliver it.

Our own capacity to deliver training is limited by how many Trainers we have and when they’re available. Another limiting factor is that generally unless groups have obtained specific funding they may not be able to afford to buy us in to deliver training - we try to keep our fees reasonable but the costs of Trainers traveling + the related costs of accommodation and subsistence all put up the fees. Add to this that if you don’t have your own venue you need to pay this and your own travel on top and the costs all mount up.

Now obviously the best option is still to raise funds and get our Trainers in if you can - they’re very experienced and its always beneficial to have a third party come in to help you along your way - but if you’re not able to do that we can now offer you an alternative - you can run your own YoMo course with the ‘YoMo Course in a Box’!

The Course in a Box includes all Continue Reading »

The Final Research Report based on the ‘Apprentice Trainers’ involved with the Young Movers programme is now available (copy attached).

The Apprentice Trainer Programme was our way of training up young people to deliver the training on our courses. The programme was never originally designed to be led by young people - our focus was to provide good training courses. We started by using the model used on the adult programmes at the National Communities Resource Centre which is to tender out and bring in external consultants and trainers. As we ran courses this way we also started to get an interest from people wanting to volunteer for courses - so we took some of these on and then eventually there came a point where I realised we should be making better use of the skills that volunteers had. So we did this bit by bit and then we got to a point where I got the most involved volunteers together and asked them if they thought they were capable of running courses themselves. A small group of us led a few courses and then finally we got Continue Reading »

The final version of the independent research report undertaken on the Young Movers programme is now available (copy attached at the bottom). I wrote a brief history of the Young Movers programme in a blog a few days ago.

The research was undertaken by the Institute of Political and Economical Governance and is in two parts - an overall report and a more focussed report on the Apprentice Trainer programme that trained up the young people who delivered the training on courses. YoMo evolved from the Young Movers programme and many of the young people that were Apprentice Trainers are still involved with us.

I’ve picked out some of the bits that I think are particularly interesting. Firstly that young people are willing to participate in their communities…..

“There was a willingness to get involved with community problems, just under nine in ten said they would like to be more
involved”

However they do view adults as a barrier to their potential participation:

“This included a lack of recognition of young volunteers, and a lack of opportunities to get involved locally. They also pointed to hostility and criticism of young people from adults. They felt that adults do not take young people’s views seriously, and did not genuinely listen. This was seen as a de-motivator for youth involvement, offering mixed messages to young people.”

And yet this is despite that young people feel Continue Reading »