Why is Youth
Involvement so important?
Part of The Scout Associations’ Vision for 2018 is for scouting to be “shaped by young people in partnership with adults”. This means that more young people have an input into how their scouting is run both locally and nationally. Youth Involvement is about engaging young people in decision making, and working alongside adult volunteers as a team; decisions are made in partnership. When you reflect back to scouting in the early years, the young scouts were much more involved in the running of their troops and took on more responsibility from an earlier age. Throughout the years this element of leadership seems to have been lost along the way, and we want to bring it back. Youth Involvement has many opportunities for both young people and our adult volunteers; a recent article I read online described how young people who are given opportunities to become managers within charities and the voluntary sector learn a lot more and gain excellent skills, preparing them better for adult life and high flying management careers. As a leader or adult volunteer within Scouting, we have the opportunity to really change the lives of the young people we are working with, by acting as positive role models and encouraging them to always go a little bit further - we often push our young people to climb a little bit higher, or to paddle a little bit further - so why not encourage them to speak a little bit louder about some of their ideas.
Part of The Scout Associations’ Vision for 2018 is for scouting to be “shaped by young people in partnership with adults”. This means that more young people have an input into how their scouting is run both locally and nationally. Youth Involvement is about engaging young people in decision making, and working alongside adult volunteers as a team; decisions are made in partnership. When you reflect back to scouting in the early years, the young scouts were much more involved in the running of their troops and took on more responsibility from an earlier age. Throughout the years this element of leadership seems to have been lost along the way, and we want to bring it back. Youth Involvement has many opportunities for both young people and our adult volunteers; a recent article I read online described how young people who are given opportunities to become managers within charities and the voluntary sector learn a lot more and gain excellent skills, preparing them better for adult life and high flying management careers. As a leader or adult volunteer within Scouting, we have the opportunity to really change the lives of the young people we are working with, by acting as positive role models and encouraging them to always go a little bit further - we often push our young people to climb a little bit higher, or to paddle a little bit further - so why not encourage them to speak a little bit louder about some of their ideas.
One of the challenges I have had as a young person was that
I had to always follow in my big brother’s footsteps - and believe me they are
not easy to follow - aged 24 he has a degree in watersport management, his own
business, sponsorship from companies, and coaches the Irish Canoe Team, as well
as having competed at European and Global competitions. I’m only a year younger
than my brother, but we couldn’t be more different - don’t get me wrong, I love
a bit of adventure, but my brain lends itself to a very different style of
scouting - and so I have taken part in world conferences, arranged youth
forums, and worked with a whole range of adults and young people. It is
important to remember that both me and my brother learnt our skills through
scouting - and both of us were inspired at different points in our lives by
different people whom we came into contact with as young scouts. Whilst my
brother was inspired by his kayak instructor, I was inspired reading an article
about young people written by a County Commissioner, but both of us were
encouraged and motivated by our leaders and the adults around us. This is where we all come in, because scouting
is diverse and as adults we should support our young people to achieve their
potential; look for the talent in the young people you work with and encourage
them to shine.
By working alongside our young people in partnership with
them, we are able to support them to make decisions about their lives, and as
an adult volunteer sometimes we can pre-empt how the story might end, but it is
important to remember that we learn by making mistakes. If we make mistakes
together then we can learn together. It is easy to see that a leader who has
been scouting for 40 years has a lot of experience, however some of the young
people we work with also have a lot of experience and expertise of being a
young person - and when these two forces are combined to work together, we can
achieve more.
To assist adult volunteers in understanding what Youth Involvement looks like,
the Youth Involvement Working Group at Headquarters have developed the
“climbing wall of youth involvement”, based on a theory by Roger Hart and
transposed into scouting language. (sorry I haven't worked out how to paste the pic in to this blog!)
At the County Conference, we asked participants to use the
climbing wall to show examples of youth involvement, from network committee
meetings to having young people organise a camp. One of the key things to
remember about the climbing wall is that you can very rarely start at the top,
and indeed climbing up the wall is the most logical way to achieve good youth
involvement and working relationships with young people.
Youth Involvement and
me
Some of you may now wonder how you can be a part of developing good youth involvement practices, and whilst here in Hampshire we are fortunate to have a well established youth council, this doesn’t mean that you all need to go away and start running youth conferences and forums. Instead, here are some ideas that you could start with to develop better youth involvement in your groups:
Some of you may now wonder how you can be a part of developing good youth involvement practices, and whilst here in Hampshire we are fortunate to have a well established youth council, this doesn’t mean that you all need to go away and start running youth conferences and forums. Instead, here are some ideas that you could start with to develop better youth involvement in your groups:
·
Building relationships - those of you who are
leaders and work face to face with young people will already know the people
you work with, but those who are not lucky enough to be a leader you might like
to take the opportunity to go along to a cub meeting or an explorer night and
spend some time just chatting to the young people at the group. Find out what
it’s like to be a young person in 2012, and share some stories over a cup of
tea. Be genuinely interested in the
people you are talking to, and find some common ground that you can laugh about
together.
·
Asking questions - once you have build up good
relationships with the young people, start to ask for their opinions and see what
they think of things, talk to them about what they want to do at their meetings
and where they want to go on camp.
·
Being unprepared - try not to enter a conversation with a view
of how it will end, listen to the ideas of the young people and take them on
board, then make sure that they know you have listened to them and show them
the outcomes of the conversations.
What the future of
Youth Involvement has in store
Youth Involvement has been high on the agenda for a number of years, and has been given a real focus by World Scouting to encourage National Scout Organisations to be more proactive in listening to their young people. As a result of recommendations made at the World Scout Youth Forum and World Scout Conference in 2011, a working group called “Youth For Change” has been set up on a global level to prepare a proposal for NSO’s to adopt around installing and measuring youth involvement.
Youth Involvement has been high on the agenda for a number of years, and has been given a real focus by World Scouting to encourage National Scout Organisations to be more proactive in listening to their young people. As a result of recommendations made at the World Scout Youth Forum and World Scout Conference in 2011, a working group called “Youth For Change” has been set up on a global level to prepare a proposal for NSO’s to adopt around installing and measuring youth involvement.
