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.
February has been an extremely busy month for us all and we have been working very hard on various things throughout the month.
Our first meeting of the month was dedicated to working on the questions for the volunteer interviews which were due to happen later on in the month. As Horizon is for young people, we felt that it was very important for us as the young people’s development group to have our input into what questions we wanted to ask the candidates in the interview. We wanted to try and really get to know each interviewee in the short time we had so that we could make sure that they would be an asset to the future of Horizon Youth Zone. In groups we all decided what we wanted to ask and then came together to summarise the questions. Everyone’s views were shared, and everyone had a huge input into the final version of questions.
Our second meeting of the month was focused on planning for the trustee meeting. Every couple of months, a few members of the group are invited to go to the board meeting and share what we have been doing and the progress we are making. This is also an opportunity for us to ask any questions that we have about Horizon. As a group we decided on a few questions to ask the board including asking about Horizon’s opening schedule and to ask for the trustees to support with fundraising for our upcoming trips. We put together a PowerPoint to present to the board of trustees. This meeting was very busy because we also had to plan who would be taking part in the interviews and at what time so that the interview day would run smoothly.
At our next meeting, the three members of the YPDG (Harriet, Rachel and Ed) who were going to present to the board, went through their presentation to the rest of us so that we could give feedback. We all also went onto a JAM board so that we could all annotate slides to share our views on questions to improve youth support and services in the UK. Youth groups had been asked to complete this and share their views so that our views could be collated and then sent off to the government. Hopefully, all of our efforts and opinions on each question will help to improve youth support and services in the future.
On 20th February, the volunteer interviews took place. We interviewed 8 candidates who were looking to get involved with Horizon- all with very different professions so they could all contribute something different to Horizon Youth Zone. We were all very impressed with the passion that the candidates showed. We had two young people helping with each of the interviews and it was a great experience for the members of the YPDG who were involved. At the start, a lot of us were very nervous about asking questions to candidates, however by the end, we had gained a lot of confidence and were a lot more comfortable talking to the candidates. Overall, it was a great experience for us to have and we are looking forward to the many interviews that will happen in the future.
To round off February, the group watched the recording of the trustee meeting so that we could all hear the answers to our questions.
After watching the trustee meeting back, the board members had given us a few ideas on how we could look at fundraising for our upcoming trips. We split off into two groups so that we could brainstorm ways that we could fundraise safely keeping in mind the restrictions of Covid. Most of our ideas therefore had to be things we could do over zoom like a virtual quiz or by ourselves such as some sort of exercise challenge. In the near future we hope to start fundraising.
We hope you have enjoyed reading our progress for February and we hope to see you in a month with more of our progress and achievements. We already have a lot of exciting things going on in March, so we look forward to sharing them with you soon.