November 2008 Archives

We'll wrap this blog up shortly but we've got one more "voice and influence" contribution reflecting on a participation strategy for umbrella organisations, this from Ellie Munro, one of The NYA's participation consultants:    

It can be difficult to create a participation strategy if your organisation does not work directly with young people. This was brought home to me when helping Y Care International to scope existing participation and identify recommendations for embedding it within the charity.

The charity itself supports a lot of excellent projects with the most deprived young people across the world, through a network of YMCAs. Projects include working with young offenders and young people in gangs, young people affected by HIV, and child soldiers. It also runs global youth work projects with YMCAs in the UK and Ireland. Projects are encouraged to involve young people from beginning to end, and the charity helps them, through training, to gain the skills and resources they need.  The difficulty is in making sure young people can be involved internally as well.

When using Hear by Right to check where you are and where you need to go, it is imprtant to identify exactly what you are trying to map. What does “young people” mean to your organisation – is it younger children, under 18s, under 25s or have you not got an age-based definition? The latter is fine, providing the group is at least defined as the “users” of the service, or those who are supposed to benefit from it. Are you trying to map the whole organisation or just one team? It might be helpful to think about what parts of the organisation make decisions that affect young people's services and lives. What is important to remember is that you are not mapping the services you support. If appropriate, you may want to encourage them to produce their own maps and plans, based on their own priorities, but ultimately it must be their responsibility, as they will have their own challenges to face.

A real benefit of involving young people internally is the lessons you learn. By embedding service users' participation within the organisation you gain a better understanding of what good participation is, what methods work and how to overcome the barriers that you will inevitably face. This puts you in a better position to support the organisations you oversee in involving young people more effectively in their work, and ultimately improving their services and their lives.

Happy Takeover Day everybody, and we hope you've had some good experiences with Youth Work Week so far.

Brighton's Experience in Mind project, a partnership between Hove YMCA and mental health charity Mind has been in touch to let us know of their exhbition at the city's Jubilee Library from 3 to 21 November. It features photographs taken by a dozen young people with the project, giving an insght into young people's mental health and providing a voice to express feelings around isssues such as depression, idnentity and anxiety.  

The sample image below  aims to illustrate how self-destruction can affect a person's mental health and that life can be bitter sweet.

Many thanks to all those who have been letting us know of what your plans are. We've also spent an idle five minutes on Google and come up with whole heap more activity: Durham's annual Youth Work that Work's Awards at County Hall;  conferences bringing together young people with the police and fire service in the Vale Royal area near Northwich; a Youth Summit in Pershore bringing together young people and council officers from Worcestershire to look at the big issues of the next 20 years; a conference involving of 160 young people in Hertsmere  looking at issues of staying safe and postivie activities; and a Q&A session for young people with the Mayor of Torbay organised by the area's member of the UK Youth Parliament.  

The NYA media team has marked Youth Work Week by handing over the writing and production our weekly spread in Children and Young People Now. Kenen Waters,15 and Priya Chauan,17, spent the day selecting themes, writing and sub-editing articles, selecting photographs, laying out pages and proofreading as well as uploading new content to The NYA website. A third young person, Fatima Manjra, shadowed The NYA's chief executive Fiona Blacke for the day and has interviewed here for a future edition of CYPN.   

Meanwhile details of other events continue to come through. In Newcastle on 7 November Barnardo's are holding an event at Westgate Sports Centre that will see some 100 socially-excluded young people have a chance to meet and talk with local MPs, councillors and other key decison makers.  The whole event has been designed, developed and will be delivered by a group of young dads from Barnardo's Newcastle Independence Network, supported by Barnardo's Regional Do Politix team with sponsorship from The Electoral Commission. The aim of the event is help young people who are currently out of education, employment or training to be aware of how politics affects their lives, to help them identify the issues important to them and to raise their confidence in communicating with politcians and others in positions of power.

Jake Manning writes:

On the 22^nd October, Harry Wade and I completed our 70^th, and final (for a while at least) Participation Works Hear by Right Workshop, having now delivered to over 1200 people from 900 community and voluntary organisations. It’s been a brilliant “tour” (as we affectionately refer to it), and emotions on the last “gig” were mixed – not least because the venue lost our resource box with all the delegate packs and training tools!

Hear by Right, in case you weren’t one of those 1200 people, is a standards framework that enables organisations to map the extent of children and young people’s participation and plan for future developments. It’s a way of building the participation of young people right across an organisation. See www.nya.org.uk/hearbyright for more info.

Several key themes emerged from the workshops, but perhaps the strongest one for me was about keeping the process manageable.

Our three top tips for keeping Hear by Right manageable are:

• Have the right people in the room

This includes the staff members you need to provide a full picture of the organisation and, crucially, the views of children and young people.  But don’t wait forever for the perfect set – get started with whoever you can get!

• Prioritise your indicators

Don’t try to tackle all 49 at once – prioritise the most relevant ones and start with those (you could choose one from each standard).

• Set an appropriate review cycle

Strike a sensible balance between being often enough to keep your strategy live, but not so often that it supersedes your capacity.

If you were one of the 1200, and have now gone through the experience of implementing Hear by Right, then what are your top tips for making Hear by Right more manageable?