Castle Vale Youth work and teenage takeover!
Wednesday 4th of March 2020
Castle Vale Community Housing recently hosted our Midlands member event, they shared with us the great engagement work they are doing with the local community.
We were really interested in the youth work they are doing and have asked them to share with us a bit more detail for you to read about!
Young Leaders
Castle Vale Young Leaders are a group of 32 young people within Castle Vale between the ages of 11-19. Working together with Compass Support, Greenwood Academy and Castle Vale Community Housing this group are involved and take the lead on social action projects that aim to tackle issues within Castle Vale.
The main campaign that the group leads on is branded No One Without (Shortlisted for a Tpas Award in 2018) The main aim of this campaign is to ensure there are no isolated residents on Castle Vale.
During Storm Emma, Castle Vale was hit by a huge snow storm which made the roads and pavements inaccessible for our older residents. Some of the young leaders grabbed their sledges and some supplies and ensured every vulnerable or elderly resident that had been identified was provided with some essential supplies such as bread, milk and tinned foods.
Every Christmas since the start of this campaign the group run a ‘donation station’ for local business and residents to come together and donate tinned food, toiletries, unwanted gifts etc. These are then packaged in hampers and distributed to the elderly, vulnerable or those that have no family to ensure they have some food, treats and a card or present to open at Christmas.
Teenage Takeover
As a spin off from our Young Leaders project a group of Year 9 students came to ‘takeover’ our housing association for the day. The day was an educational day not just for the students but for our staff also!
Once the students arrived and settled we went through general housekeeping, they then moved into their teams to takeover!!
The teams they worked with were as follows:
- Partnership and Development - this saw them design a property and it’s interior
- IT - they helped on the phone and with some basic IT Helpdesk calls
- Community Safety - held a meeting with the police and discovered how we work in partnership to tackle crime
- Marketing - they were let loose and took over our Social Media for 2 hours
- CEO - They sat in the ‘big office’ and understood his roles and responsibilities and what it takes to be a CEO
The afternoon was a Speed Grill with our Senior Management Team where they got to meet all the Directors and ask them questions about what they do, how it affects the community and anything else they dared to ask!
A pizza lunch was then followed by them going back into their teams and presenting what they had learned throughout the day along with what they liked, disliked, what they would change/stop doing if they were in charge and any recommendations to improve their community.
The feedback we received was amazing and one of the students claimed they had learnt more in the one day than they did all week at school.
If you’d like to read more about Castle Vale's engagement work you can visit their website here