(Guest Post by Hugh Doyle, outgoing Project Manager for the Youth Participation Project (YPP) in Donegal)
In the early days of YPP, from our base in a small office in Drumany Old Church in Letterkenny, Bill Vaughan and I, ably supported by Project Coordinator Gerry McGeady, set about our task of “Capacity-Building for participation the population of young people and service providers in the North West” or so the Action Plan said anyway! We first set about developing reference groups of young people all across the North West. In this way young people looked at specific themes (mainly Alcohol and Drugs, Mental Health and Sexual Health) and presented their ideas to service planners, managers and providers at our first conference, Right to Be, in the Everglades Hotel in Derry on the 2nd December 2005. The planners and managers were highly impressed with the insight and knowledge those young people showed that day and why wouldn’t young people show Continue Reading »
Kirsty will be running a session at a couple of Participation Works events next month with ideas on using practical resources for youth participation - you can find details in the flyer here plus here’s the blurb:
Hosted by ParticipationWorks,Participation: The Essential Tools and Resources is a one day conference that will explore the available tools and resources to support children and young people’s participation in a range of settings. Delegates at the conference will learn how to use tools and resources to improve children and young people’s participation. Participants will also be able to discuss specific participation issues through a number of workshops. The conference will be a great networking opportunity for everyone involved in participation
Also from Participation works you can download a new guide (at the bottom of the page in this link) - called ‘How to Use Multimedia Tools to Engage Young People’ written by Tim Davies and I think he’s done a very good job creating a useful starting point for anyone thinking about using new media but not sure how to start.
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? Continue Reading »
Some more interviews with children involved with the Grace Orphan Project in Zomba, Malawi. Mussa (12) and Simple (13) are two of the nicest young people I’ve ever met - if they were in this country we’d have jumped at the chance to get them volunteering with us. As it is its probably more worthwhile that they’re talents are put to use to help the Grace project develop - lets hope they get the opportunities they will need to develop their education and stay involved….
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 »
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.