I’ve been starting to pull ideas together for the Social Innovation Camp this coming weekend. I’m already starting 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: dyw, Education & Skills, innovation, Innovation & Technology, Resources, soft skills

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 enquiries@yomofoundation.co.uk

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

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 (more…)

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Tags: events, politics, res, Resources, soft skills, volunteering

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 (more…)

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I’ve just listened to Tim Davies talking about the presentation he & Sarah Schulman gave based on their research into a Positive Youth Development model. Looking at the slides & listening to Tim took me back years ago to when I first started developing what has now become YoMo.

A question I sometimes get asked is why did I decide to work with young people? The honest answer is I didn’t particularly - my background is in sports - I took a youth development job as temporary work & just kept going - so the more interesting question is why did I keep on going?

I started my work with young people on an estate in Worcester at a typical local youth club - very small attendance and dominated by the local ‘bad’ kids. The club was supported by volunteers and I observed it for a few weeks and then decided to close it down and start afresh. My reasoning for this was that I didn’t think it was right that on an estate of 5000 properties only 13 young people attended the youth club - and I felt that both the young people and volunteers attending it were preventing others from joining through their behaviour and reputation.

So starting afresh I went out to talk to young people in the area and asked them what sort of activities & services they would like. There were various suggestions but the one with most enthusiasm was an idea to set up regular discos. At one of the citywide youth worker meetings I updated everyone on this and was immediately shouted down - “you should be working with the ‘bad’ young people - they’re the ones that need us”, “disco’s aren’t youth work”, “discos will only cause problems” & so on. The bottom line was that nobody (more…)

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Tags: events, Society & Issues, soft skills, youth work

We started this blog less than a year ago last July. It wasn’t our first attempt - we ran one for a short while before going to Tanzania in 2005 but it never really took off. I for one just never ‘got into it’ and I didn’t much see the point. I knew what we were doing back then would be interesting but I wasn’t sure it was interesting enough to other people to bother writing about (after all who reads blogs?!).

About 2 years ago we then started to develop an online volunteer network for young people involved with the programme we used to run. From this I became much more interested in the use of online networking and I searched (more…)

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The blurb about this films says “Across India 192 million children between 6-14 years of age across 1.1 million are not going to school. This film for Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (Universilisation of Elementary Education) is a kind of promotion of going to school. The film “catches the moment when children all across India from Kashmir to Kerala wake up in the morning and run to go to school” “
I just thought it was a cool film!

While on the subject of education I would like to make a quick defence of UK schools. I was reading yesterday about (more…)

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