Hi, welcome to our blog. We are the Young people’s Development Group (YPDG). We are young people who have come together to help create Horizon Youth Zone in Grimsby. This blog is to keep a log of our progress and achievements as we continue to work towards the opening of Horizon Youth Zone and the many opportunities that it will bring.
Welcome back! As a group, we were very busy in October with people visiting us to talk about events, lots of sports sessions and catching up with New Bedford.
For the first meeting of the month, we firstly gave feedback on the conference in London and showed the group some pictures. We also handed out some very cool wind turbine socks and hand sanitisers that we had picked up from the conference for the group. Also, this was our first session in Grimsby Institute which was a much-needed change to location because it was getting colder and darker outside. We split off into smaller groups to discuss the Horizon leaflet: what we liked and didn’t like about it and how we would change it.
Before the next meeting, we were doing curling which was fun and a sport that a lot of us have never done before. Then we had some people from the Culture House come to lead a session. We were given an activity of thinking into the future and designing an advert for something appealing to different audiences. Some of the ideas that we had were a culture area, pop up markets and a stadium for music and activities on the sea.
Also in October, we had another zoom call with our partnership organisation 3rd EyE in New Bedford. We caught up with the young people in America, discussing firstly what we did over summer but then moving on to thinking about what we wanted to call our partnership and what we wanted our logo to look like. Some of the ideas we had for our logo were to include the dock tower, a whale, a fish and an eye.
We were visited again by the Culture House, and we did some work on what we wanted the Youth Zone to do. We drew a pyramid diagram of importance and showed the steps to changing young people’s lives. After that, we did a self-reflection task, answering questions on what we were good at and great at and the skills that we have. Then we went round complimenting each other.
In our final meeting of the month, we played softball tennis before the session. Simon joined us again to talk about our application to the National Lottery Heritage Fund. We decided that we wanted to do a video about the Youth Zone and the YPDG with all of us saying parts. So, we then wrote some lines of what we wanted to include, thinking about the heritage of Grimsby and how the Youth Zone can reflect Grimsby’s heritage such as including a time capsule in the Youth Zone.
We hope you enjoyed reading all about what we have been doing in October and hope that you will be back to read about what we’ve been up to in November.