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 »

We traveled to Malawi intending to use a similar model to the one we’d used in Tanzania - working with an International School to do work with children from local schools. This time though we wanted to be a bit more adventurous with our training!

We started by doing some group development activities with children from the International School. One of the biggest challenges here was that Malawian culture still has a very traditional approach to men & women. When we got onto talking about leadership and asked a group to decide upon a leader, I asked them why they’d decided on their leader - what qualities did this person have? “Well he’s a boy” came the ‘obvious’ answer along with an obvious kind of shrug!! (This despite the fact that Continue Reading »