Thanks to a 4 hour delay at Luton Airport I bought myself a lads mag a couple of weeks ago and within was a feature article about a festival organised by V - the volunteering charity for young people (aged 16 - 25) - the ‘article’ was slanted towards showing how funky modern volunteering actually is (Its not about beards & sandals - learn dj’ing etc. & so on) - except that it wasn’t an article by the magazine at all - it was a full page advertisement in one of the biggest selling monthly magazines and I suspect a very expensive one too.

I remember a couple of years ago being shocked when I first saw an advert for Connexions at the Cinema and then later on TV, plus of course plastered all over billboards, buses & the various media. I say shocked because at the time I wondered how much bloody money is being spent on that?! and at a time when I was trying to fundraise for our own youth programme.

Well I felt similar with the V advertisement, except I can perhaps see a better argument for V who are ‘in the business’ of trying to recruit more young people to volunteer. My question though is given the huge amount of costs of using Continue Reading »

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!!

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 Continue Reading »

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.

Its taken us years to develop our courses and the resources we use. One of the things I’ve been working towards for some time is to be able to ‘package up’ our training so that other people/organisations can deliver it.

Our own capacity to deliver training is limited by how many Trainers we have and when they’re available. Another limiting factor is that generally unless groups have obtained specific funding they may not be able to afford to buy us in to deliver training - we try to keep our fees reasonable but the costs of Trainers traveling + the related costs of accommodation and subsistence all put up the fees. Add to this that if you don’t have your own venue you need to pay this and your own travel on top and the costs all mount up.

Now obviously the best option is still to raise funds and get our Trainers in if you can - they’re very experienced and its always beneficial to have a third party come in to help you along your way - but if you’re not able to do that we can now offer you an alternative - you can run your own YoMo course with the ‘YoMo Course in a Box’!

The Course in a Box includes all Continue Reading »

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

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 Continue Reading »

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 Continue Reading »

Film from the training with Bournville Village Trust. Photos are also on Flickr. Looks like there will be a lot of busy young people in Birmingham!!