Participation Works

NCVYS members and other voluntary and community youth organisations and projects assembled on April 15th to share and showcase their work on youth participation. The day involved a range of interactive workshops led by adults and young people from the projects and organisations who won last year’s Young Partners Award ceremony.

Each workshop leader focused on showcasing their work to attendees, equipping them with effective tips and tools to take away and develop in their own organisation. There were also other discussions around defining the term youth participation and how the organisations can continue to learn from each other to support young people within their work.

Young people were involved in the delivery of the workshops and spoke confidently of their involvement within the organisations they worked with. They gave practical tips on how others should engage and work with young people.

Some of these young people were NCVYS’s Young Facilitators who were involved in the delivery of an action planning workshop where they led active sessions on exploring a variety of areas relating to youth participation, giving attendees the chance to discuss how they work with young people and looking at the challenges they face and how youth organisations can better deal with these challenges. At the end of each workshop delegates noted a number of action points to take forward after the event.

Teresa Santamaria, the National Council for Voluntary Youth Services (NCVYS) North West Young Facilitator said, “Youth participation can be difficult to define immediately and the definition can sometimes be over analysed but an important issue to remember is that we must listen and support young people and keep sharing good practice methods”

The Young Partners Practice Sharing event is a free, one day event which builds on the Young Partners Award ceremony giving the projects that won a platform to lead workshops and share their work with other youth organisations and adults who work with young people.

Steven Pryse, Head of Member Engagement at NCVYS said, “The Young Partners Practice Sharing event saw 20 different organisations come together to share their experiences of youth participation. Through interactive workshops participants were able to find out directly from previous NCVYS Young Partners Award winners how they have involved young people throughout their organisations. An additional workshop gave participants an exciting to opportunity to work with young facilitators from ENVOY to develop action plans for how they will develop their good practice in youth participation further."

Tue, 20/04/2010 - 12:58