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!
April 5th, 2009 at 1:21 pm
What an excellent article that was too…
Well done Sean!! Am quite sure it will inspire young people everywhere!!
G