Youth Ambition's Young Leaders Inspired this Summer!
The Youth Ambition programme delivered three holiday schemes in the summer of 2018. The areas that we delivered were in Littlemore, Rose Hill and Northway. The aim of the holiday schemes was to provide young people with fun, challenging, creative and engaging non-formal and leisure activities.
We recruited five young leaders who supported the planning, preparation, delivery and evaluation of activities. These young people were all from the council’s regeneration areas and two of these young people were BAME, one was a young carer and another involved with social services. Despite our best efforts to have an equal gender balance all the young leaders were male.
In order to recruit young leaders the staff spoke to young people within youth activities about what was involved. We then created a role description that outlined the young leader’s roles and responsibilities and discussed with young people who were interested. The young people who were interested attended a short interview. All the young people who interviewed were successful and were given a letter of congratulations.
The week before the holiday schemes began the young leaders attended an essential skills for youth work training day. The aim of this was to equip the young leaders with the knowledge, skills and capabilities to form their roles successfully. During the holiday activities the young leaders:
- Arrived before the sessions every day to take part in the briefing where they were assigned duties for the day
- Supported with the setting up of the session. This included: getting out equipment, preparing for any activities, signing people in, meeting and greeting other young people
- Delivered at least two activities per week. This included: sports sessions, group work about diversity issues, team building games, ice breakers, cooking, evaluations and celebration events
- Encouraged other young people to take part in activities by being enthusiastic, adapting the activities to interest all young people and communicating the activities which were on offer
- Gave their opinions on the quality of activities and providing ideas on how to continuously improve through taking part in debriefs and evaluation processes.
As a result of taking part all five leaders a Young Leaders AQA Accreditation. At the end of the schemes we asked the young leaders what they had gained through being involved. They said:
- “I have learnt how to organise activities and learnt about risk assessments”
- “Planning is important when running sessions”
- “I have learnt how to lead activities”
- “I have better listening and communication skills”
- “learnt different ways to get people to listen”
- “It was fun and I didn’t think I could do it because I am a shy person and now I can lead ice breakers to people”
- “I enjoyed running the sports and the diversity projects to get people’s views”
- “Remembering to stay focused”
- “I have enjoyed being a young leader because it has taught me new skills”
- “I can act as a role model for friends and other young people”
The staff agrees that this was a really successful piece of work. All of the young people expressed that they would like to continue beging young leaders and within sessions other young people have said they would like to be involved in the planning, preparation, delivery and evaluation of the session.