Over the weekend I was at the DfID and Civil Society Organisations Youth Working Group Advocacy residential (long title & a busy weekend!). Over dinner I was talking to Helen from Commonwealth Youth Exchange Council, and she shared an idea they’re exploring for exchanges between disadvantaged groups of young people in the UK. It sounded interesting, so, in David Wilcox style I grabbed the video camera and caught a quick interview.
This is pretty much what I’ve been doing for the past 7 years! Sadly the funding ran out and we haven’t yet had the time/capacity to find an alternative.
We ran courses for 11-16 year olds that brought together 4 or 6 groups of young people from different parts of the UK for 4 days. The programme particularly (but not exclusively) targeted groups from the areas of most deprivation.
It was very successful, very popular and developed into a programme led by young people that had come through it. If learning is taken from this theres not really much need for a pilot programme - the ‘piloting’ has been done! What is needed are suitable venues and funding. The methods & approaches for recruiting & running this kind of programme are well developed.
The emphasis on deprivation/disadvantage does make sense but its also important to consider that very often the areas labeled as ‘most deprived’ often have access to many funding sources & resources - its important not to overlook the groups from areas that haven’t quite got the ‘deprivation classification’ but are still relatively disadvantaged and that don’t have such easy access to funding to do these sorts of things.
One of the reasons we didn’t find replacement funding is that we were in the last of the lotterys funding programmes that allowed UK wide programmes - if we’d applied again it would have had to be to all four countries (each of which had different priorities) (fine to have country programmes but why not also a UK one?!).
Anyway if help is needed in development I’d be more than willing because a programme like this is still very much needed.
More details about the programme are available here:
http://www.breakfastsociety.com/2008/02/research-report-into-training-for-young-peoples-community-involvement/
and here:
http://www.breakfastsociety.com/2008/01/positive-youth-development/
Hi,
When the call for ideas for the EU Year of Intercultural Dialoguewas first put out in 2006, one of the ideas along the above lines, was for young people across Europe to meet and organise a European Intercultural Youth Conference, as well as develop European Cultural Youth website that would inform future EU policy and bridge divides in European countries by increasing dialogue with young people across members states.
More info here:
http://ec.europa.eu/culture/archive/dialogue/contributions/pdf_en/schumann.pdf