Get an Award

The above group started in September 2006 by young people asking for more opportunities to gain qualifications via accredited courses. Therefore young people are invited each week to attend a regular session to attain a chosen skill or experience. Examples could be - ‘Baby Think It Over Course’, First Aid, Drugs Awareness, Food Hygiene or Senior membership training.

The first project or type of award for young people to achieve, came from young people’s positive experiences from the Summer Area Outdoor Activities days, where young people took part in canoeing. From this staff arranged and booked Monday evenings from October to February for young people to undertake an ‘Introduction to Canoeing’ learning the skills to enable them to undertake their - 1 Star Canoeing Award’ later in Spring 2007(The course has to be undertaken on open water so the weather needs to reflect the date they can undertake this qualification). This weekly course is organised via Ivanhoe Youth Centre.

How we promoted this new development to the Youth Centre programme was:- by sending personalised invitations to those who previously had shown interest, by advertising this on our promotion week at the beginning of term or by staff encouraging young people to attend once the youth programme was up and running. In all we had probably 15 young people initially interested in doing this event, we ideally wanted 12 but since beginning have had regularly 8 young people attend - of those 8 six are young women. They are now well on their way to completing the course and we hope they will achieve their 1 Star in March/April 2007(Different date due to having to take the qualification on open water).

Prior to the Canoe Course completion date 5th February 2007 staff will be straw polling young people’s viewpoints on what to offer next for young people, this could be one of the above examples or something entirely different. We do also not expect to work with the same group we are currently working with however, it will happen on Monday nights. The next step has been decided by young people with them wanting to undertake ‘ Food Hygiene ‘ qualification.

From 12 young people completing their Food Hygiene another 12 young people have contributed more recently to a 4 week art/graffiti project. Future plans are to offer an extensive Monday evening 'How to become a Youth worker' training programme.

What the members think...

What was the best thing?

"Art project"
"A lot of different things"
"Canoeing"
"Cooking"
"Food hygiene"

What do you like about the club and why do you choose to go there?

"Learnt a lot of different things
Youth workers are welcoming and many different activities
Different to other things we do here
Gets us of the street/Out of trouble
We can get advice
Fun
Get qualifications
Cook,chill and no one mess"