Youth Action Network: Empowerment and Young People
Posted by Andrew Brightwell on 17th May 2010
Mukith Miah of Youth Action Network
Davina Goodchild, the CEO of Youth Action Network (YAN) introduced YAN’s Empowering Young People project.
YAN works with organisations across England that are involved in youth action work and is committed to work with those organisations and young people to encourage youth volunteering. The Empowerment and Young People project sought to provide good examples of YAN’s nine principles of youth action.
Mukith Miah then explained how the project was delivered. He said that YAN recruited young researchers to go into organisations, speak to them and their young volunteers and develop case studies of each of the principles that it could then show on its website. They helped to equip the young people with reporting skills and supported them through the process.
Listen to our interview with Mukith, here: -
[podcast]http://rawm.podnosh.com/files/2010/05/Muks1.mp3[/podcast]
Not only did YAN find an interesting and engaging way to explore the benefits of Youth Action, the work also had huge benefits for the young people that they recruited to carry out the research. And he introduced one of the young researchers, Emma Jarvis, as a case study.
Young reporter Emma Jarvis
She went to the involve project in Preston and looked at their event to showcase the work they were doing with youth volunteers. She said it made her really want to shout about what they were doing. She found it daunting to go and interview people, but that and learning how to write a case study gave her transferable skills and was really rewarding.
Emma spoke to us after the presentation. Here’s the interview:-
[podcast]http://rawm.podnosh.com/files/2010/05/Emma.mp3[/podcast]
The organisation learned a number of important lessons:-
- Davina said that working with local authorities proved a steep learning curve for YAN, which is used to working in the voluntary sector.
- It was important to develop local local relationships and build trust.
She said there was also a lot that it had learned about working with the young researchers. These included a number of observations:-
- Stories of the young people involved were as interesting (if not more so) than the stories they were reporting on.
- They went through a difficult process learning how to use the young people’s words, because of concerns over their palatability or suitability for an adult audience. The decision was taken not to edit or change the words.
- It might be necessary in future to build in more time to practice the research and production. In the end they used the first case studies gathered as the ones that were used and published. They now want to go out and use the young reporters again.
Davina said it was difficult to keep a geographically disparate group was a real challenge. This was solved by holding monthly meetings.
[podcast]http://rawm.podnosh.com/files/2010/03/Davina-Goodchild-March-18.mp3[/podcast]