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!!

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 »

You may have already seen the films of the Candidate Speeches for Cheshire Youth Parliament. Before the young people standing for election get to this point they attend a Candidates Weekend. All young people in Cheshire can attend the Candidates Weekend and over 2 days we provide some training to help young people consider whether they really want to stand for election, and if so what they would stand for.

Some of the criticisms of the Youth Parliament system are that its not truly representative and that the people that get elected are just elected on the basis of how many friends they’ve got. The Youth Voice team in Cheshire have been working really hard to ensure this isn’t what happens up there. Prior to the weekend they organise meetings at youth clubs in each region to encourage young people to attend the training. The training activities we use include Continue Reading »

Say It, Do It, decided to campaign against the way young people in care are stereotyped as its something they feel passionate about due to experience. This was provoked by the main issues they are challenged by which includes bullying, social exclusion, negative portrayals, lack of privacy and being pre determined and judged because of a file. They believed a possible opportunity to overcome these issues would be to make a film showing the journey of life to convey key messages and get a call to action. Contacting the media to try and change perceptions and attitudes along with providing information to the public was also seen as an opportunity. Time was obviously a barrier, and a huge barrier is the law which would make it very difficult to create 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 »