The Voice of Youth has RETURNED! And you have the phenomenal blogger Lucy Furneaux to blame/thank for this (delete as appropriate).
It's a tumultuous time for me and for youth voice in general. Personally speaking, I'm now well into a gap year that, unfortunately, hasn't gone quite as well as I'd have hoped; and now that I'm out the far end of the Young Essex Assembly and the UK Youth Parliament, my youth voice activities have become almost entirely concentrated into the Chelmsford Youth Council. But equally, I have big plans.
Youth Services
On the national front, youth services across the country are being mowed down by local authorities seeking easy ways of meeting their government-imposed funding cut obligations. Staffordshire's youth service has gone completely, and is not alone. Essex's, after a long campaign, has spent a year winding down - or perhaps that should be bracing itself - for the full force of the budget reductions to happen in April. In London, youth services could be cut by as much as 90% - and this has already been felt, with the highly-successful Brent Youth Parliament now completely destroyed.
But the Choose Youth campaign in defence of youth services is gaining momentum. Alongside this, the National Youth Agency is putting together solid policy proposals; an Early Day Motion in favour of statutory youth services is currently the third-highest ranked of the current crop, with well over 100 supporting signatures; and the pressure on the Labour Party to adopt a policy in favour of statutory services is strong. I'll be documenting these developments in the comings months.
Young people from Birmingham protesting in favour of youth services [1]
Team V
I'm also hoping to put this blog to use to cover my work with Team V. Team V is a community leadership program run by the charity vInspired. To briefly cover it, as a leader I'm responsible for delivering campaigns in my local community and creating local volunteering opportunities for 18-25 year olds in the process. However, rather than rehash a full explanation here, I'll point you in the direction of the flatly superior blog of my friend and fellow Team V leader Lucy here.
Our last campaign, Beyond A Tin Of Food, was focused on food poverty and combating it. Nationwide, Team V leaders managed to collect 31,128 food items for food banks, which is equivalent to over 35,000 meals. You can check out the video of the campaign below, which details both the background to the campaign and our successes.
I personally struggled with the campaign initially - Chelmsford's branch of the Trussell Trust food bank told me that they didn't need the help! While that's great for them, unfortunately, it knocked my campaign off-kilter for several weeks. (Nonetheless, please donate to them here!) Fortunately, a brace of gallant filmmakers by the names of Will and Sam saved the day by producing a killer script for an awareness-raising film on food poverty, which we began filming. Sadly, we never quite finished... but we learned.
And it's that invaluable experience we'll be taking forward into Campaign 2: Do You Care, to raise awareness of the plight of young carers in our country. I'll be doing a more detailed blog post in future, once my campaign takes shape, but at the moment I shall simply let you know that not only am I fantastically excited about it, I'd totally encourage anyone reading this who is a young carer or works with young carers in Chelmsford to get in touch, to help shape the campaign.
The future of the blog
So you can expect to see not just updates on the nationwide campaign against youth services here, but also my Team V exploits too. On top of that, I'll be doing my best to cover the transition of Essex's youth services as they are handed over to community provision - with a particular interest in youth councils. (Anyone who's had the misfortune to chat with me longer than five minutes will be very aware of how strongly I care about youth councils!) Finally, I will hopefully be offering more coverage on what the Chelmsford Youth Council is doing. We've got an exciting year planned and the group is definitely due a lot more coverage and publicity than it currently receives.