I think the first film I edited was in 1998. I’d used a (huge) Sony camcorder to film a watersports weekend that I’d taken some girls to from the youth club (it involved camping in a field near Holme Pierrepont much to the despair of the accompanying female worker I’d dragged along!). At that time I borrowed some sort of console and the footage was edited on my TV at home onto a video cassette! (The console in the pic is just an example I don’t think it was that fancy!).

When I started work on the Young Movers programme we decided that a film of each course would be a good evaluation method and that by getting young people to talk about what they intended to do following the training this would help with a bit of reflective learning. The Chief Executive was so keen on the idea he went straight out and bought a new Panasonic digital camcorder which he plonked on by desk the next day (in fact I think they still use it!). Back then I was a Windows user - we had no idea how to edit digital video, so a trip to Dixons (now Currys) and the helpful salesperson recommended ‘Dazzle Moviestar’.

Well what a bloody nightmare that was! Once I’d figured out how to use (more…)

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Tags: film, Resources, social media

I’ve been starting to pull ideas together for the Social Innovation Camp this coming weekend. I’m already to think the ‘Personal Development Reports‘ will be more of a ‘Soft Skills Plotter’ albeit the measurement of development over time is critical so hopefully a better name will come up in time.

For the concept to work there are two key factors - usability and credibility. Credibility will take some time but one of the main ways of achieving this will be through use so I’m very much hoping that over the weekend I’m lucky enough to get to work with technical people who are able to make very complex things very simple!

In terms of use I think those that will find the system most useful will be:

• Young People - becoming aware of their skills and feeling confident to talk about them
• Practitioners - measuring impacts of projects and comparing different the outcomes of different programmes and projects
• Employers & Educators - understanding what soft skills are and who has what

So we’ll need to understand what soft skills are too! And then having worked out what they are we then need to find a sensible way of helping people assess them over time (and in a way that they understand and enjoy).

This isn’t something new to me - our kind of work has far more outcomes in the soft skills area than anything else and its always been a frustration that its so difficult (and questionable!) to measure the ‘journey’ that people have gone on. If you ask yourself the question “what kind of a person was I five years ago and what skills have I developed during that time?” - its very difficult to answer other than in terms of hard skills & experiences “I was a Supervisor, now I’m a Manager” or “I completed my Diploma or I did a First Aid Certificate” - but this doesn’t give a real insight into the person you are and what you have to offer.

Anyway back to what those soft skills are. I’ve been building a list and (more…)

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Tags: Education & Skills, innovation, Innovation & Technology, Resources, soft skills

Five banners down, 40 new people, Five 3D maps cleared, 80 odd pictures and a sandwich spread later- and its only day one!

Myself and 3 volunteers began training in Letterkenny, Ireland today as part of a Leadership through the arts project. We will be running the one-day course for 3 days, with 6 new groups every morning, so we will meet and work with over a hundred different people! Apart from a slightly delayed flight and a forgotten driving license, we got off to a good start this morning with a new idea we were piloting.

The idea came from the current resource we use, prospective. Prospective aims to make participants consider and make a link between their community, the people and resources in it, issues those people face and opportunities which would allow them make a positive contribution. We decided to take a more practical approach to this method incorporating arts to have participants create a 3D sculpture for their map and then using a bit of social media by way of films to present the different aspects of their area. There were positive and negative aspects to this method in comparison to the resource so this has allowed us to identify what works best. Thats why it’s great we are doing it again tomorrow!

Due to the late arrival in Ireland and the extremely early start, unfortunately we haven’t had much time to enjoy Donegal, so hopefully tomorrow we’ll be more up for a mission! As for traveling out here alone, everythings gone to plan so far (apart from a few currency worries!!), so the long term planning and folders full of addresses, bookings, session notes etc paid off!!

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Tags: events, Resources, social media, soft skills, volunteering

Film with the young people from Mullaghmatt Youth House over in Monaghan, Ireland, who take us a on a tour of the local area and interview some local residents about local issues and their feelings about the youth house.

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I took the boys to the science museum today and on the way back Ben told me about his friend who had recently been to see the Palace. I told him a watered down version of when I went to the Palace a few years ago - the full version is much more interesting though…..

I used to work with Young Carers and one of the lads involved with the project got an invitation to visit the Queen. Alan had a busy life - he looked after his disabled mum along with his younger sisters all while studying for his A Levels. He certainly didn’t have time to hang around drinking so his knowledge of alcohol was (more…)

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Tags: age, events

I’m very pleased (and surprised) that an idea I submitted for ‘Personal Development Reports’ has been selected to be one of the ideas to be developed at the Social Innovation Camp next month in London. This convention has had a fair amount of positive publicity lately particularly on online media. It’s been mentioned numerously in passing in various forums with huge traffic, just a couple of days ago a long thread about this was posted on Pokerstars

You can read the details about what this is here (and please do add comments if you have suggestions for its use/development).

The concept is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time and is based on the booklets we use (details here) and also the Youth Awards site that we’ve been developing for some time (and still have a very long way to go!).

The Personal Record Cards we currently offer aren’t designed to be an assessment of young peoples skills - their purpose is to try and make young people aware of their personal skills and qualities and also to encourage adults working with them to have conversations about these things.

Now in theory the booklets could also be useful as evidence of young peoples learning/development - but to use them this way depends on young people using them honestly (and understanding the various ratings), and the supporting adult keeping good records.

An online version can take the principle of this idea much, much further. First of all the questions can be (more…)

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Tags: Education & Skills, events, Innovation & Technology, Resources, soft skills

I wrote a few weeks ago about the Grace Orphan Project in Zomba, Malawi and that we had offered to sponsor some of the children so that they can go to School. Well I’m very pleased that today we’ve agreed to support 10 children to go to school including covering the costs of their school uniforms, text books and extra tuition.

I’ll post updates on how this progresses later in the year.

The cost for each childs school fee is an average of £21 a year! Not a lot to us but if you consider that the average wage in Malawi is about 80 pence a day (£24 month) then relatively thats a very large amount and for children without parents there may be nobody to provide any kind of financial assistance.

We’d like to support more children in the future so we’re on the look out for any kinds of donations towards this. All money donated will be used directly for the work of the Grace Project - if you’d like to make a donation send us an email to info@yomo.co.uk

Update:

I’ve set up a group on facebook: “I’ll give up 1 thing to help a child in Malawi go to School for a Year”

Something that really affects you when you’re out there is that you eat in a restaurant - a meal that is very average by our standards - but you think all of the time that the food you leave is much more than the children you’ve been with will get to eat. So the idea of the group is to give up something for a short period of time - it can be a luxury - chocolate, expensive drinks & so on, but give it up for a short time and put the money you would have spent to one side and then send it over to us and we’ll make sure its used to support the children involved in the Grace project. Its a small gesture but I can’t emphasise enough that its something that will make a very big difference - its a very simple way of investing in people to help themselves. If you’re not on facebook you can still do it anyway!

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Tags: Africa & Overseas, child rights, poverty

I finally got round to submitting our response to the DCSF Consultation on ‘Youth Sector Support‘ and one of the questions raised an issue I’d considered a while back.

Participation is the current ‘in term’ (although I see ‘empowerment’ is making a come back!). But while I think youth participation is in principle a good thing, its not the be all & end all. I also think too much apparent participation is in fact minority participation - it uses a model of representation rather than effectively allowing any young person to be able to participate in an organisation or service. Representation is very useful - but only if those doing the representing are effectively representing the views and needs of others (and often this is questionable).

So how do you broaden participation so that young people who are not ‘represented’ are able to have an input? (more…)

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