Community Participation & Youth Involvement
Training Topics
You're Welcome, Making health services young people friendly
Youth Advocacy & Participation
An Introduction to Peer Mentoring
Developing Facilitation Skills
Confidence Building & Assertiveness
Increasingly agencies are looking to consult with young people and encourage their active involvement in shaping the services that affect them. This section offers a range of training programmes to support and motivate young people to get involved and bring about positive change.
You're Welcome
Making health services young people friendly
In the UK all young people are entitled to receive appropriate healthcare wherever they go for it, including general health services as well as specialist things like sexual health and CAMHS.
For some young people going to a clinic can be a frightening and daunting experience, so a national set of standards called ‘You’re Welcome’has been developed to help health services ‘get it right’. The criteria covers important things like how welcome young people feel, what information they are given about their rights, how their privacy and confidentiality is respected, and the way young people say they are treated by staff.
This is a brand new course to enable people working in clinics to make their services even more young people friendly. It explores values and attitudes to working with teenagers and considers some of the barriers to successful engagement.
Packed with practical ideas from recent Mystery Shopping projects undertaken with young people, it highlights concerns as well as recommendations for improvements. By the end of the day participants should feel confident about developing health services that make young people feel welcomed, valued, looked after and respected.
Who is it for?
This course is for anyone working with young people in a health setting e.g. GUM clinic, one-stop-shop, condom distribution scheme, CAMHS clinic, outreach services and GP practice. This includes clinical staff, such as nurses, doctors and psychologists, administrative teams and reception workers, as well as social workers and outreach professionals.
Cost
This course costs £550 per day for up to 16 people. That is under £35 per person for a day’s training. To book or discuss training please email me.
Youth Advocacy & Participation
From local campaigns to peer education programmes and service consultations there are an increasing number of opportunities for young people to shape the services they use and get their voices heard in the community.
This training will help develop the skills young people require to campaign, advocate and represent peers on the issues that affect them.
This course is offered as a one or two day course, and can be delivered as a ‘train the trainer’ programme for anyone working with young people on the participation agenda. Alternatively Vanessa can facilitate it for groups of up to twelve young people aged 13-19.
Learning outcomes
- By the end of this training participants will have:
- Considered ways to promote active citizenship and community participation
- Developed communication and listening skills
- Increased self confidence and motivation
- A clearer understanding of advocacy and the skills required to represent others
- Considered diversity issues and thought of ways to get the voices of under-represented young people heard
Supporting Youth Work Resource Book: Young People & Citizenship
An Introduction to Peer Mentoring
Peer mentoring gives young people the opportunity to share ideas, express their concerns and discuss the issues that affect their lives with their peers. Peer mentors can also play a strong preventative role by providing emotional and practical support to those young people at risk of isolation, bullying or otherwise not achieving their full potential.
This introductory day explores the ethos of peer mentoring, increases awareness and provides those working with young people aged 13-19 with a basic toolkit of ideas to create effective training sessions for young people volunteering to become peer mentors.
Learning outcomes
The training aims to:
- Consider how peer support works and how it can have a positive impact and build resilience
- Increase understanding of the peer-mentoring role
- Look at building positive relationships between mentors and mentee's
- Explore boundaries and confidentiality issues within peer mentoring
- Offer a framework for the development of a peer-mentoring scheme
Supporting Youth Work Resource Book: Young People & Citizenship
Developing Facilitation Skills
This programme has been developed to enable young people to build the skills to facilitate peer workshops, consultation events and training. Working on assertiveness, exploring diversity and the ability to represent yourself and others, the day provides anyone working with 13-19 a toolkit to deliver facilitation skills workshops with confidence.
Learning outcomes
Participants will:
- Consider the range of opportunities for young people to use facilitation skills
- Explore a range of activities and tools to build facilitation skills
- Look at ways to enable young people to challenge effectively and manage group behaviour
- Consider diversity and cultural issues
Motivating Young People
This introduction to motivation has been devised to provide youth workers and Connexions advisors with a basic toolkit of techniques to help motivate young people.
The workshop offers activities to look at what motivates some people more than others and considers ways to build confidence so that young people can set their own achievable goals.
Learning outcomes
Participants will have:
- Explored what motivates people to succeed
- An overview of some theoretical models
- Tried out a range of activities and tools to motivate young people
- Explored the use of feedback
- Considered ways to set goals and targets with young people
- Developed an action plan for motivation
Supporting Youth Work Resource Book: All The Right Connections
Confidence Building & Assertiveness
This workshop aims to provide a toolkit of ideas for workers to build confidence skills with young people enabling them to communicate more effectively using assertive behaviour techniques. It also offers ideas to explore with young people the difference between passive, assertive and aggressive behaviour and ways to say what you want, whilst respecting others.
Learning outcomes
This training offers participants the opportunity to:
- Explore confidence and sources of personal power
- Consider assertive, aggressive and passive behaviour
- Try out confidence and assertiveness building activities
- Take part in communication building activites
Supporting Youth Work Resource Books: Working with Young Women & Working with Young Men
Feedback from delegates...
'Vanessa clearly knows her stuff and it was a great experience!'
'This training gave me a framework that I can really use to set up my own training for Peer Mentors'
'The training was a very good variation between theory, practical and discussion.'
'Vanessa is clearly very knowledgable about Peer Mentoring and backed this up with real-life examples that I found really interesting.'
Delegate: Various, UK Youth
Date: September 2011
Course Attended: An Introduction to Peer Mentoring
"I wanted to say a massive thanks for the training that you delivered for our Staff Team on our residential. Everybody thoroughly enjoyed the day and took away a lot of learning that they are already applying to their practice. The evaluations forms were extremely positive and were complimentary of the style, content and delivery of your training."
Delegate: Donna Hilton, Youth Service Manager, DUH Youth Service
Date: June 2010
Course attended: Confidence Building & Assertiveness
