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! June has been a month full of different events and activities which have all been very interesting and exciting.
At the start of the month, we went through the diary sheet of all of our upcoming events. It was very exciting to see how busy we are going to be. After just briefly going through all of the events, we started brainstorming ideas for some of the events such as the call with the 3rd Eye New Bedford group, the quiz for the British Exploration Society and also what we wanted to say in the upcoming board meeting.
At our next meeting, we finished the quiz questions for the call with the British Exploration Society and we continued to prepare for the board meeting. Also in this session, we had a visit from a local Northeast Lincs Councillor who told us about her job, why she does it and her ambitions for the area. We were all very interested in hearing what she does, and it was nice to get back to meeting visitors in person.
On Saturday 12th June we had a Zoom call with the other 4 Youth Zones which are going to Scotland with the British Exploration Society in August. We learned more information about the trip such as ideal places to get water from and also about finding a good place to set up camp for the night.
At our next meeting, we went through the upcoming events and confirmed which people were available to attend them and then we finalised the presentation for the board meeting. As one of the upcoming events is a fundraising lunch, (which unfortunately has been postponed due to COVID) we discussed how to introduce ourselves to different people such as supporters of Horizon. As well as this we had received some good news that there had been a donation to Horizon Youth Zone and so the whole group worked on a thank you letter and then we all signed it. To finish the meeting, we all tried out Bowls and Croquet.
On 16th June Molly, Izzy and Millie attended the board meeting and gave a presentation to the board.
On the 22nd we had a very interesting session where we worked with digital awareness UK to discuss some of the big issues on social media such as scamming, body image and hate comments. As young people, it is important that we share what we think are the big issues and share what sort of space social media is. Young people are the generation that use social media the most so it’s good to get our opinions. We also talked about online dating and whether it’s easier to talk in person or online. Overall, it was a very enjoyable session, and it was very interesting to hear everyone’s different views. We were even treated to some dominos pizzas for our hard work which we all appreciated.
The following night we attended the Find your Fire event with the British Exploration Society where we were put into our teams for the expedition, and we got to meet our leaders. We also named our clan, decided on our animal mascot and team colours and got to know each team member.
On the 24th of June we visited Oxford University – click here to read more about our trip.
Towards the end of the month, we had our second zoom call with the 3rd EyE New Bedford youth group where we shared what we have been doing since our last call as well as doing a quiz on kahoot to learn more information about Grimsby and New Bedford.
We split into smaller groups to discuss what we want to get out of this partnership. In the group that I was in, we spoke generally about different aspects of our lives such as school and also about sport. I was particularly interested in talking to the young person from Boston who plays American football. I enjoyed talking about our shared interest in sport and we spoke about how exciting it would be if we got to watch a sports game when we hopefully go over to each other’s countries. In other rooms, they spoke about the differences in cultures and lots more. It was really nice once again to speak to different young people and to get to know them better.
We hope you enjoyed reading what we have been up to in June, and we hope to see you in a month so you can hear about all of the events we are attending in July.