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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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 responded to a blog on the Innovation Exchange about the Commonwealth Youth Exchange Council who are apparently interested in setting up a programme that brings together groups of young people within the UK to share ideas & experiences etc. The idea in fact sounds exactly the same as what we were doing on the Young Movers programme for the past 7 years.

Incidentally my reply hasn’t actually appeared on the Innovation Exchange Site - and incidentally too the Commonwealth Youth Exchange Council have yet to reply to a query I sent to them on a separate matter last week so if anyone picks up this please ask somebody to reply!

The ‘coming together’ of groups from different areas is a powerful experience - people get to appreciate they aren’t suffering their problems in isolation and very often realise that perhaps (more…)

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Film from the recent training with Donegal Youth Council in Ireland

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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

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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.

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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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