Starting out on the right foot

One of the foundation blocks for quality youth work is ensuring that your Youth Group responds to young people’s needs.  Before you start planning how, when, and what will be delivered, you should be involving young people, if not handing over full responsibility for deciding on the programme of activities that will be on offer, but first you need young people!

Consulting young people

A Planning Group

It is likely that you already have contact with a few young people that want this to happen, use them as a planning group to lead a wider Youth Consultation Event.  If you don’t have that in place already, set out to create a planning group of young people.  Try asking local the school/s if they can spread the word in e-news updates, Social Media Groups, or Notice Boards.

Consultation Event

For the Youth Consultation, don’t think that handing out a paper form is going to create a mountain of responses.  Try holding a Youth Consultation event – free pizza is always an attraction.  Be creative and open minded and try a drop in event rather than holding a formal meeting with a start time and an agenda.  Promote it via local WhatsApp Groups or social media platforms.  Keep the informal theme going with themed areas to contribute ideas on what activities will be on offer, what age range or age ranges should be included, when should it meet, and where it should meet (if there are options).  You could use some of your Start Up Grant to cover the cost of refreshments.

Tell everyone what you discovered in your Consultation Event

You don’t need to be young to be frustrated at never hearing back after a consultation process.  Not all the ideas are likely to be taken forward, but seeing evidence that your opinion was captured is very important.  Plan out how you are going to feedback after the consultation exercise and deliver on what you promised.  Shared all the ideas collected and what has been prioritised and how it will be taken forward.  Think through how you are going to do this prior to the Consultation Event, so that you can tell people how this will happen.