So, it’s been a while.
Posted at September 19th, 2009 by Sean
Hello (:
In the last chapter of this unfolding story, you heard that we’d been to the AGM, Steven and Sean were elected as charity trustees, I wrote an angry letter to a magazine, James fell off some things, and that we weren’t successful with our Myplace bid.
Then, mysteriously, the airwaves went silent.
There is a reasonable excuse for this – that is exams. We’ve all been fairly busy over exam period and holidays, but now, we’re back. And we’re bigger.
Yes, that’s right. Bigger. This weekend is the first weekend of the training for the 15 new young advisors we’ve recruited. This weekend is the weekend after the first I Make A Difference ceremony, and this weekend is exactly 2 years since the decision was finalised to have a Young Advisors scheme in Waltham Forest.
Sentimental, eh?
I’ll be posting up some pictures from the I Make A Difference ceremony and the new Young Advisors’ training sometime soon – that way you can see what we’ve been up to, instead of reading it.
With this flurry of activity locally, it’s easy to forget the national picture of what we’re doing. But we’re still with it. In fact, Waltham Forest Young Advisors won the award for Most Outstanding Contribution to the work of the national charity a few weeks ago, and we’ve been selected as one of a handful of schemes to conduct a national review of the Charity’s work.
This year our focus is on building a recognisable image for ourselves – to push out into more third sector work, and to make the biggest difference we can.
So, we’ll catch up next week with photos and lovelyness from the training.
Until then, tara!
Sean
Lots to talk about …
Posted at April 4th, 2009 by Sean
Okay, so in the last month or so, a lot of things have happened. As James detailed in his last post (about his dinner, more than anything… 
), Steven and myself attended the National Young Advisors AGM in Derbyshire. It was good fun – we did a lot of philosophising, and eating, and abseiling off of tall things.
Highlights include Steven and me being elected to sit on the national board of trustees for the Young Advisors charity, James spending ridiculous amounts of time talking to randoms, and falling off ropes, and meeting a load of new people from across the country.
The Wednesday after that, the Hazel Blears panel had a panel meeting where we all got put up in a nice hotel in Victoria, visited a Prince’s Trust volunteering project in Hammersmith, and met Hazel for our meeting to discuss how to get young people more involved in volunteering – got any ideas? Leave us a comment!
Last month we learnt that we weren’t successful in our Myplace funding bid to build The Hub, which is unfortunate, but there were a lot of other very good bids out there, so as long as Young People are benefitting somewhere, we can do our jobs and keep trying. There’s another funding round later in the year which we may apply for.
On a more local level, we’ve recently taken on a job to get more Young People into leisure centres – focusing mainly on advertising. After a meeting with Clyde Loakes, the council leader, and later on, the interim Head of Leisure and Sport in Waltham Forest, we deduced that there were a lot of facilities for young people, but they weren’t very well advertised. So, we’ll be popping up around the borough throughout the next month to interview leisure centre managers, do advertising spot checks, and run a few focus groups with young people from across the borough.
Lastly, a while back, a columnist named Claire Fox wrote a rather mean article about the Blears panel in the Municipal Journal. You can read her article here. I quickly got my typing fingers on and fired off a response which got published on Thursday. You can read that here. Just thought I’d show off 
I’m sure there’s one or two things I’ve forgotten, I’ll edit as necessary.
Good day!
Annual General Meeting in Derbyshire!
Posted at February 20th, 2009 by Sean
So here I am sitting on the floor in the Hope Valley, Derbyshire (when I say sitting on the floor of the valley I don’t mean I am sitting in the mud outside in the rain, I mean I am sitting on a carpeted floor inside this very nice outdoor activity centre with 70 or so YoungAdvisors…) Where was I? Oh yes, the floor in the Hope Valley and Sean has asked me to write the first blog of the event, so I had better make it fantastic, or maybe you will all switch off and decide not to read any more….
So, after a night that consisted of dinner (I had sweet and sour chicken with half rice and half chips, and 3 prawn crackers and 2 small slices of naan bread – I wasn’t quite sure whether to have one or two pieces of naan bread, but I decided on two because I was quite hungry, and actually in hindsight I do think it was a good idea as I ate them both, some salad (4 pieces of orange pepper and a spring onion that was a little bit of a mistake because now I still have that oniony taste in my mouth – you know the taste yeah? Where its that dry oniony taste that no matter how much you wash you teeth you know you will taste it when you wake up in the morning for a bacon roll, but then onions taste nice with bacon so its not all bad…oh and I had a little bit of salad) But that wasn’t it! Steven very kindly poured me a glass of water, and for desert I kind of had this sponge cake, but didn’t realise until after that there was treacle cake and custard aswell, so I was very naughty and had that afterwards aswell (very good, though the custard was a little lumpy, but still very nice!!!) Yes so after dinner…
We went orienteering, and I teamed up with some YA’s from Liverpool, but we came joint second, beaten by Steven’s team – but I am sure, AM SURE he was cheating somehow…that’s not fair I know I am sure you won fair and square Steven Oh and schmoozing with the Empowerment lot from the DCLG, squatting for about an hour on the floor with the President of YoungAdvisors philosophising about the world, philosophising with Sean and Steven, lots of philosophising, meeting lots of people, painting T shirts, almost missing trains because I didn’t know there were 2 stations in Kings X, finding a sweetshop bang out of the 1800’s and eating lots of fudge, and looking forward to abseiling off an 80 foot railway bride tomorrow!
Back to Sean….
I Make A Difference campaign launch!
Posted at February 4th, 2009 by Sean
Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year :)
Posted at December 28th, 2008 by Sean
Hello there!
You may have noticed the lack of blog posts recently, there are two reasons for this:
a) We’ve had a lot to do that isn’t very interesting
b) We wanted to wait until we had some concrete stuff before going to press…
So, here goes.
As you heard in previous posts, we’re currently working with the new Children’s Commissioner, Ann Tennant, to launch a huge media campaign to show the world all the great things that young people do. So far, due to a few corporate set-backs and general slowness of things, there hadn’t been too much to report on this front, but now, we’re getting somewhere. So here’s an outline of what we’re planning…
I make a difference will be an award nomination programme, whereby any young person can be nominated by any adult or other young person for achievements or volunteering of any type. This means, it’s not limited to academic achievements, or sports achievements – it’s for young people doing anything “amazing”.
So, what’s “amazing”? The great thing about “amazing” is that it’s so subjective. We want to hear from anybody who thinks that a young person is doing something great, because young people shouldn’t be limited by a general consensus on a meaning, and because, it doesn’t matter how big or small these things are, they’re still positive. We want to show the world, and the media, that young people can, are, and will always be doing amazing things.
The campaign will be renewed every year, using street media (such as buses, bus shelters etc) to get the word out, post cards and nomination forms so people can get their word in, and culminating in a huge awards evening so we can let the word back out again, to the world.
Secondly, we’ve recently been approached by the Lea Valley park authorities (in partnership with the RSPB) about developing ways to get young people more involved in the park, and more importantly, to try and increase the interest in the natural enviroment. So, if anyone’s got any ideas, do leave a comment, or drop an email to sean@wfyoungadvisors.org.uk.
Next bit is a bit sad, unfortunately. On December 1st Lyndsey had to leave us to move on to a different job with VT Education (the company that run the schools in Waltham Forest). We’ll miss her a lot, but she’s not too far away, so we’ll have to harrass her from time to time.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, Lisa will also be leaving us after our next meeting, due to a staff reshuffle within the council. But she’ll be in the Town Hall, so we’ll pester her whenever we can.
As a result of these two departures, we’re welcoming our new interim team lead, James Gould (whose email address I still need to set up), and a temporary involvement from Lyndsey’s old boss, Mark Yeadon. So, a huge thanks to you two!
One last thing before I go off and sort out email addresses and such: By our next meeting, we should know if we have won any Myplace funding or not. So, please keep your toes, fingers, and any other possible body parts, crossed for us!
Hope you have a great new year, and got lots of lovely things for Christmas,
Sean.
Conference time!
Posted at October 17th, 2008 by Sean
Hello all! (Well, I’m most probably speaking to about 3 people, here…)
As you should know, if you’ve been keeping yourselves up to date with the blog, Young Advisors from the borough were recently charged with delivering this years Youth Conference. Which we did! Somewhat amazingly, I might add.
Yesterday (16th October) saw ten students from each school in Waltham Forest being invited to Waltham Forest Assembly Hall to take part in workshops themed around local democracy and participation. That’s well over 130 students, by the way. More shocking, however, is that for all intents and purposes, it was down to 6 Young Advisors to run workshops, make sure everyone was where they were supposed to be, host the day, keep to time, and on top of all that, to still retain the highest standards of education, safety and fun.
Well, I think it’s testament to the whole team that a) No ambulances were called, b) No-one decided to take an “informal break” from the conference, c) We got almost unanimous “Outstanding” feedback, with the remainder being “good” or “okay” and, d) We all enjoyed the day as well. So, really, a huge huge huge congratulations to all of yesterday’s team, and everyone else who made it happen.
Another reason that yesterday was so important, was because it marked the launch of the boroughs new Children’s Commissioner, Ann Tennant. She was interviewed and recruited by young people, a proportion of whom were Young Advisors – to this end, Young Advisors will be the interim steering commitee for Ann for the first year of her posting. Ann’s role will essentially be to help young people understand their rights, but equally importantly, help young people implement those rights. This includes advocating for young people and also promoting their image in the media, and in turn, society.
At the forefront of the latter aim is the I make a difference campaign, which was originally Georgia’s idea, and has been adapted and developed by the steering committee and Ann. I make a difference will be a campaign aimed at rewarding young people for all the great things they do, not just in school, but anywhere and everywhere young people are doing something to help their community. Young people can be nominated by anyone, be it parent, priest, teacher, youth worker, as long as young people are recognised for the things that really and truley deserve recognition, it really doesn’t matter. The nomination and award procedure will be backed up by a high profile media campaign, and the awards on July 10th 2009 will attain national and regional media coverage.
Ann can be reached at Childrens.Commissioner@walthamforest.gov.uk.
Lastly, our “special” embargoed piece of news that we couldn’t tell you last time…
Now, I really didn’t want to be the one to blow my own trumpet, but asking other people to write this at 8 on a Friday night seemed somewhat unreasonable. Anyway, little old me managed to get an extension to my job with Young Advisors – I’m now on Hazel Blear’s personal panel of Young Advisors, to advise her on policies for the Department for Communities and Local Government. The full CLG press release can be seen here.
Anyway, yay, go me, etc. It will be rather interesting, and I’ll keep you all updated!
That’s it for me, tonight,
over and out :]
Sean.
It’s raining, it’s pouring …
Posted at October 5th, 2008 by Sean
But our Young Advisors definitely aren’t snoring! (Sorry, that was a terrible pun, I shall go and punish myself suitably for it afterwards) This Autumn marks a big increase in work for al of us here at WFYA. As Georgia has told you, we’ve just secured our newest plan for the Myplace bid, and can now only hope that we’re successful. I’d like to reiterate just how exciting this is for all of us, it’s huge! As well as that, we’re hosting and running this years Waltham Forest youth conference. Young Advisors will be hosting the event, running workshops, and generally making sure nothing goes wrong! Linked with that, is our current work with the Educational Psychology team around how to roll out Educational Psychology to young people who can’t, or won’t access it through school. We’re working on how to break down the stereotyping of psychologists, and how best we can position the access points to ensure maximum coverage. One idea, if The HUB is successful, is to give EP the oppurtunity to use The HUB as an access point. All great news!
On top of that, we have some special secret news that we can’t tell you until Tuesday…
So keep reading!
Seany out!
Life & SOUL of the Party!
Posted at September 23rd, 2008 by Georgia
First off, thanks to Sean for the title, my idea for a quirky one was slightly more inappropriate, his, as everything eles his does is perfect, seriously is there any ends to his talents? He can be quite overwhelming to us mere mortals ha-ha!
Well, seeing as I’m pumping up Sean’s ego, I might as well pump up everyone else’s. I think a big WELL DONE is due to all the people involved in the creation of the MyPlace bid. From every young advisor that was there at the initial brainstorming to the big important people that worked out the final finance issues- i want to say to you all how amazing you’ve been and how its really appreciated.
Well after many sleepless nights for Lyndsey dreaming about fulling in the application form, and being stuck in a room with me, Steven and others for over 6hours finalising the bid, I’d like to inform you all, its FINISHED. The decision is now officially out of our hands, its up the the fate of god (aka: the big lottery fund) It really looks amazing and we have got such a clear vision about what “The HUB” would achieve.
I don’t think that you’ve been updated since Sean’s last blog, since then we are now working in partnership with not only the YMCA but The SOUL Project (Supporting Our Unique Londoners). Its a fantastic project that includes the popular Tumble in the Jungle as well as a working with excluded pupils. Its fronted by such an amazing guy called Steve who’s really into the whole project, basically its a really positive partnership.
But the icing on the cake has to be the building, the only word to explain it is WOW. The SOUL projects main building has most of its second and top floor empty, ready to be used by us! As it is an old warehouse the size of the place is outstanding! The space in which we proposed would be the gig venue is spacious and ideal for everything we dreamed about. The place in which the cafe is supposed to be built is perfect, and it would be relatively easy to construct a glass dome surrounding it- making it WORLD CLASS! Not only would we have most of the space in the main building, the bid also includes ownership of the building beside it. This building is another warehouse, and is for sale for 1 million pounds (the price indicates the size of the building!). In this we would be able to have the ICT suite, recording studio, mini gig venue, culture room, games room and many more. We are also going to construct a link connecting the two buildings together to ensure that all the services are under one roof!
My writing has most probably become erratic and disorganised as i get overcome with excitement when talking about this, it really is such a positive and brilliant project.
Young Advisors are also busy with other things at the moment! We are the steering group for the campaign being fronted by children’s commissioner Ann Tennant, its focused on highlighting and publishing the non academic achievements of young people in our borough. But that is still in the initial brainstorming process, so either me or Sean will update you about that when we get more concrete stuff organised.
Then there’s the youth conference that on the 16th of October, that young advisors are supposed to be hosting Also we are having involvement in the joint school council meeting and are working with educational psychologists to make their service more accessible, basically busy busy busy us!
I hope this blog will do, I know its not as good as the almighty Seans, but hey give me a break its my first one. Of many hopefully!
Im going to love you and leave you, off to bed! I’ve got work experience with the wonderful Ms.Lyndsey tomorrow
I’ll write soon!
Georgia xox
Just like Clockwork!
Posted at August 29th, 2008 by Sean
Well, howdy there!
Hasn’t been an update for quite a while, this is mainly due to people being on holiday and whatnot, but we do have some good news now! Today, we had an extra special late August meeting to discuss and begin to pull together the proposal for the myplace bid. What made it extra special was meeting our newest partner, Forest YMCA!
It turns out the the YMCA are also making a bid for the money, so we decided to join forces. Along with the 50 flats for homeless Young People that the YMCA are already building, they wanted a super youth facility, armed with similar ideas, we met the head of Forest YMCA at our meeting to discuss how to combine our efforts. The Clockworks Development is a disused clock factory just off Forest Road, and in close proximity to the YMCA hostel, and the Church Hill area. It consists of 10 warehouse units (Four large, Six small) and a 5 story wing where the 50 flats are being built. Our proposal, as a joint venture, is to secure funding to refurbish the warehouse units for use as a state of the art youth facility, complete with cafe, gig venue, IT and Media suites, and much more, and to aid the refurbishment of some of the already existing YMCA facilities that can be further incorporated into the facility (which we’re hoping to call ‘The Hub’).
The Hub will then be accessible to the 50 young people in the YMCA flats, as well as the 185 young people in the YMCA hospital, further targets include young people from the Waltham Forest College, just across the road, and the Church Hill Area which is just behind it. The Hub will serve, essentially, the Hoe Street Ward, which is one of the five most deprived wards in the country.
The Hub will be open to all young people, and the community in general, with the aim of providing a safe, relaxing, fun place to be, and to assist young people in whatever they choose to do. Medical advice will be available, as well as a health advisor or nurse. Waltham Forest Young Advisors will be part of the management panel and will, in effect, manage the enterprise on both a corporate, and day-to-day basis.
Essentially, it’s gonna be a really awesome place, and we’re very excited! After our little guided tour around the YMCA owned assets, and a brief viewing of the Clockworks development (we were amazed to see that work was already underway on the flats!) we said goodbye to Tracy (Head of the Forest YMCA) and headed back across the road to the town hall to continue our plans. With myself and Georgia on work experience for the next month with Lyndsey, we’re hoping to get the final proposal in on time, and to make it great.
All is going to plan, just like clockwork
Watch this space,
much love, Sean.
CYPP and CAKE
Posted at July 7th, 2008 by Sean
Well, actually the latter isn’t an acroynym for anything but there was lots of it. Our last team meeting on Tuesday 1st July was mainly focused around reviewing the Children and Young People’s Plan (CYPP, geddit?) pack to be given out to young people in thr borough in order to gather opinions and thoughts on what they want in the Plan.
The CYPP is a plan that every Local Authority must produce in order to set down a framework for the involvement of young people in decisions made about them. In Waltham Forest, we’re putting together the plan for 2009 – 2012.
Anyway, this blog is deviating almost as much as our meeting did. We spent 45 minutes reading through it(with countless anecdotes from Steven about the the charity he’s starting, and about the bid he’s doing for something else – which only served to confuse us about our own bid..), and being generally impressed.
The rest of the meeting was spent going back through and adding things to our bid that would be necessary, and to conform to the beaurocracy that seems to become ever more oppressive. At any rate, we’ve got a good chance. But we did realise one problem – our bid is almost entirely concieved from our own ideas. We needed other young people and the wider community to give us their ideas and thoughts. So, we’re hijacking the Green Festival!
We’re planning to be at the festival in Lloyd Park, Walthamstow on the 13th of July to do some video consultation for the bid. So, if you’ve got any ideas you’d like to put forward, or you fancy coming down for a chat, please do come along and speak to us!
On top of this consultation, we’ll be going back over other consultations that have been carried out in the past to try and glean what we can from them. This means that young people who won’t be at the festival on Saturday have a fair chance of getting there opinions recognised as well.
While there is none scheduled as such, do watch out for us while out and about, because we may pop out from behind a tree and ask you things, or even better, we’ll fall from the sky.
With that over with, it’s probably worth mentioning that two of our Young Advisors (namely Joanne and myself) will be hosting and facilitating a regional conference next week in Croydon, along with Southwark Young Advisors, and The Yarn – Luton. So, more info on that when I find out myself, and I’ll try and get a few pictures (as there’s a distinct lack of them in this blog so far!).
Remember, keep up to date with everything with the new Upcoming Events page (look to your left, and you should see it), which will be kept as up to date as possible, but obviously we’re only human!
Sorry it’s me again, but alas I have failed to remember to ask someone else to do it. MyBad.
Lot’s of happiness and have a good week, Sean 
)