Youth Leadership and Youth Voice Training Saturday 10th May 2025
By Ella Holliday
On Saturday, eight young people, from Fylde, came together for our youth leadership and youth voice training day. The young people, aged 12 to 15, had two workshops, each an hour long. The first workshop was led by Francis, a youth worker from Lancashire Boys and Girls Club who is promoting the ‘Youth Voice’ campaign. Francis spoke to the young people about his work in ‘Youth Parliament’ and offered them statistics based on young people’s platform in society. This raised a lot of interest and awareness from the young people about why their say and impact is so important in today’s society. For example, their vote in the general election and how decisions around young people’s involvement in politics is influenced. Francis also ran two activities, the first demonstrating what happens when we vote as a society of various influences and age groups. In the second activity, the young people were each given a sheet of paper with several of the same tables. Each table showed the sections of government, from welfare, to the NHS, defence and ‘other’, which referred to topics such as transport, and so on. The young people were then told they had £100 to divide between each category. They completed each table in a different way; first independently, then in pairs, and then in groups. Then, it was discussed as a whole. Francis then shared the real statistic behind this, which certainly shocked the young people in regard to how the nation’s money is spent. From this, we had a group discussion, of how we influence choices and why their voice is so important.
After some pizzas, the young people then had a workshop led by my dad, Barry, who has a lot of experience in building teams and skills in younger individuals, who are building their career and expertise. Firstly, Barry began by asking the young people about what sorts of attributes they thought were needed to build a team. After a short discussion, the young people then completed two team building exercises. For the first one, the young people were separated into two groups, and each were given uncooked spaghetti and marshmallows and were asked to compete against each other in a small timeframe to build the tallest tower. After a lot of bickering and frustration, Barry got the group back together, and asked them what worked and what didn’t. The young people then spoke about their lack of communication and some people expressed they struggled collaborating and felt they would have worked better independently too. After this, Barry asked the young people to form a human knot and to then untangle themselves. Again, with more thought around the efforts of team building skills, they re-grouped after almost managing to get everyone untangled. The young people had picked up on what their strengths and weaknesses are, and planned to use this knowledge moving forward. These skills can now be used towards our youth leadership and development groups and our upcoming projects and events, such as our residential trip to Castlerigg in October. Lottie and Simone, two of our young people, provided us with short clips, each offering their thoughts on the session.