youth engagement – Cardiff Youth Council

Second Grand Council event 23/03

March 19, 2016March 19, 2016Cardiff Youth Council

Hey guys!

As some of you will know, as part of its plan to engage more with young people and CYC, Cardiff Council are working with us to produce three Grand Council events at the City Hall this year; the first of which that was held in December, on the theme of “What Matters to Future Generations” was a great success.

We’re really looking forward to meeting young people from schools colleges and youth organisations all over Cardiff this March for our second installment, in order to discuss how Cardiff can achieve UNICEF “Child Friendly City” status. This status would recognise Cardiff as a city committed to fulfilling children’s rights.

You can find out more about this initiative here.

We’ll be looking at the criteria needed to meet this, and will have the opportunity to offer solutions from the perspective of young people to the challenges Cardiff faces in becoming “Child Friendly”.

Here are the basic points that have to be met:

Young people…

know and understand their rights know about the services available and how to access them
have a say in the design, delivery and evaluation of services
experience connected, tailored and responsive services, even if their needs are complex
feel safe, nurtured, prioritised and are treated with dignity.

For those of you who have received confirmation of their place at the event, I’ll look forward to seeing you there! Remember that the event is being held at Cardiff City Hall, Cathays Park, 9:30-2:00, and light refreshments and a packed lunch will be provided.

And for those of you who are not attending the event- is there anything you’d like to comment on with regards to Cardiff becoming a “Child-Friendly City?” If you have any remarks, questions, comments, concerns, or suggestions regarding any of the above points, or anything else, don’t hesitate to get in touch!

You can comment on this post, tweet us @cardiffyc, get in touch via our Facebook page, or send an email to me at maegandaviesjohn@outlook.com.

Thanks for reading guys, and remember to like and share!

Mae and CYC 🙂

Don’t Hate, Educate

January 31, 2016February 8, 2016Cardiff Youth Council

Hi everyone,

Just a quick post to tell everyone that there’s a new campaign page up and running for CYC – #DontHateEducate

This page has been set up by Cardiff Youth Council members to support our priority of tackling racial and religious discrimination in Cardiff, if you’d like more information on how the UK Youth Parliament as a whole are taking on this priority, then click here.

This is a really important issue, so please show your support by liking and sharing our new page: https://www.facebook.com/donthateeducatecyc/

Look out for upcoming events, and please make sure to attend and show your support!

Thank you for reading,

Stay awesome.

Xinyu, and CYC 🙂

Time Credits

January 25, 2016January 25, 2016Cardiff Youth Council

A message to those of you who aren’t sure what these are,

Time credits are those pieces of paper, fondly nicknamed, “monopoly money” by some members of CYC. Some of you have been receiving these since the start of this academic year, and to those who haven’t, they look something like this;

The whole principle of these tokens is, that for every hour you spend helping out in the community, you get something in return- that’s why for every hour you spend at a CYC meeting, and working on your campaign in the office, you sign off for another on of these.

As lovely as they may look stuck on the wall as wallpaper, or as a decorative cover on one of your schoolbooks, or even making you feel that much richer by sitting there building up into a massive pile in your wallet, I think it’s about time we get out there and spend them. On what, I hear you cry! Well, it actually is pretty exciting. You can do a whole range of things, from going to the gym, to getting your hair cut, to working up a sweat at a Zumba class, to rock climbing, touring the stadium, or a farm, or a castle, to watching a movie… check out the list for yourself, here!

If NONE of that catches your fancy, which I doubt, you can also donate your time credits to an organisation that could use them to give children opportunities to play, and have fun in the community… or even give them to a friend or family member to use!

So get out there, and spend!

See you soon,

Mae and CYC

(Remember to comment, share, tweet, whatever if you have any questions!)

Happy New Year!

January 12, 2016January 12, 2016Cardiff Youth Council

Hey everyone,

Firstly, sorry for activity being a bit slow over Christmas, but now we’re back!

Just to remind everyone of the meeting we have coming up tomorrow, and to show you the agenda that’s been prepared for tomorrow, here it is;

We have some really exciting news to share with you all about the Mental Health priority, and we’ll be doing some important work on all of our priorities this week, so it’d be great to see you all there!

As always, a warm welcome to any new members, and if you have any questions at all feel free to get in touch 🙂

Look out for some exciting updates really soon!!

Thanks again,

Mae and CYC 🙂

Grand Council Event 7/12

December 4, 2015December 6, 2015Cardiff Youth Council

Hey guys,

So this Monday, as some of you know, a “Grand Council Event” will be taking place. I thought you might like a bit of an overview of how the event will be happening, and what it’s all about.

Firstly, that it’s this Monday the 7th of December, to begin at 9:30am at the City Hall.

Secondly, that CYC will help facilitate three of these events over the course of the academic year, and this one is the first! This time, the focus will be “What Matters to Future Generations”, and all the young people that come along will be presented with the valuable opportunity to voice their opinion on the councils budget proposals and “What Matters”, the city’s strategic plan. As we all know, how the council decides to spend its money could have a huge impact on the services available to us and our families, so having your say could be really important.

Here’s a timetable showing the format of the days proceedings;

Time Activity

9.30 Welcome and registration

9.45 Housekeeping/outline of day/group contract

9.50 Official Welcome and Cardiff Vision for the future

10.00 Short Term Strategic Planning- Table top group discussions around the councils budget proposals

10.45 Medium Term Strategic Planning- Round 1 Of Workshops

Each group should identify a facilitator, a timekeeper and a reporter.

People in Cardiff are healthy;
People in Cardiff have a clean, attractive and sustainable environment;
People in Cardiff are safe and feel safe

11.20 Round 2 Of Workshops

Each group should identify a facilitator, a timekeeper and a reporter

Cardiff has a thriving and prosperous economy;
People in Cardiff achieve their full potential

12.00 Future Diff Creative Workshop

Artist led workshop where delegates use cardboard boxes to make Cardiff City landscape. Delegates answer following questions and stick sheet to their building and tweet last answer using #futurediff

What is the best thing about living in Cardiff?
What needs improving the most in Cardiff?
How would you advertise your perfect Cardiff in one sentence/slogan

12.30 Working lunch and carry on Future Diff workshop

1.00 Round 3 Of Workshops

Each group should identify a facilitator, a timekeeper and a reporter

Cardiff is a great place to live, work and play;
Cardiff is a fair, just and inclusive society.

1.30 Chambers Debate

Jointly chaired by CYC Chair and Cllr Dan De’Ath. Delegates debate a themed session around the 7 key areas of “What Matters”. Each area is introduced by workshop generated 1 minute message. Graphic recording to be made by artist, session to be audio recorded.

2.30 The end (…until the next one!)

You can find more information about the Plan to make Cardiff “A Livable City” here.

Otherwise, if you have any questions about the event, feel free to contact us on Facebook through our page Cardiff Youth Council, or to email me at maegandaviesjohn@outlook.com. You can also tweet us @cardiffyc.

Hope to see lots of you at the event, and remember to share this with anyone who might be interested! We can provide you with a permission slip if the event coincides with school or college or whatever.

See you soon!

Mae and CYC 🙂

Curriculum For Life

October 4, 2015October 4, 2015Cardiff Youth Council

Hey everyone, happy Sunday!

Last year, one of the priorities which emerged from the Make Your Mark ballot and onto CYC’s agenda, was “Curriculum For Life”- this means that a large number of young people felt that the education they received at school wasn’t adequate in preparing them for the “real-world” challenges they would face after leaving. Not just that- the curriculum doesn’t prepare us for the challenges we face now, it fails to provide us with the skills and information we need to live happy, healthy lives; the emphasis on grades and exams is such that young people are increasingly unable to cope with the pressure.

We decided to conduct a survey on what young people thought of their PSE lessons, what content they think is missing, and how they think they could be improved.

The results were… interesting. Young people from different schools all over Cardiff took part, and the most notable thing about the results, were the inconsistencies that they showed us. There is no real structure, or any set curriculum for PSE, meaning there are huge differences in the quality of the teaching some people received- though quite a few people claimed they were happy with their PSE lessons, we question what this means when over half weren’t convinced… are some people just happy to have a free lesson which doesn’t mean anything, to do nothing in? Either way, it was unanimously agreed that there’s a lot missing from our lessons, from important topics like citizenship, first aid and mental health awareness to having a qualified specialist doing the teaching.

We turned the most important results into an infographic, which can be seen here; Infographic_v2 (4)

What do you think these results mean? Do you agree? What should be done about it? Let us know in the comments, or on Twitter, or Facebook!

Thank you to everyone who came to September’s meeting, and we’ll look forward to seeing you later this month!

Remember to share!

Mae and CYC 🙂

Make Your Mark

September 2, 2015September 2, 2015Cardiff Youth Council

Hey all!

If you’ve been to any of our events lately, or seen us around the streets of Cardiff, you may already recognise these lovely little ballot papers- you may even have filled one in for us. Which can only mean one thing- it’s time to Make Your Mark! Yearly, these ballots are released to the local youth forums around Britain by the UK Youth Parliament, meaning young people have a say in what is discussed by members of the Parliament in their annual House of Commons debate. It also decides what issues will be campaigned on across the UK. Basically, this is pretty big stuff, and takes nothing more than a tick, or a click, to complete!

The scheme is the largest youth consultation of its kind in the UK. Last year, 875,000 11-18 year olds voted, the highest number of young people ever consulted as part of the scheme. But we think we can do even better, this time, and their target is to reach out to, and collect votes from 1,000,000 young people.

Cardiff Youth Council wants to make sure that we share this enthusiasm. Last year, the votes of 2,152 people were collected, a 6.9% turn out for young people in Cardiff. We can do better than that, right!? Especially when it’s so ridiculously easy to get involved.

For those of you who haven’t had a chance to fill out a ballot yet, here’s how it works– it’s super simple! The paper consists of a choice of 10 topics, which the UK Youth Parliament identified as key issues prioritised by young people. You vote for the one that you think is the most important, the one that needs the most focus (only one, one only, such a tricky choice!) When these votes are collated and counted, the top ones will be discussed by the Youth Parliament in the House of Commons, on November 13th as part of Parliament week.

Last year, in Cardiff, the top two topics voted for were Mental health, and Curriculum for life. This was the foundation of the two successful campaigns we have been running in CYC over the last year, which we’d be happy to answer any questions about, and will talk about in further detail in future posts.

If you’d like to vote right now, click here. Forward this link to any people, groups or organisations in your network of the right age, and encourage anybody you know to take part… let’s hit that target, let’s get Cardiff’s voice heard.

Thank you to everyone who’s taking part- hopefully we’ll see you on the 23rd, where our next meeting at city hall will be held, 4:30pm, be there!

Any questions, don’t hesitate to get in touch, email me at maegandaviesjohn@outlook.com, or get in touch on Twitter or Facebook! You can find out much more about Make Your Mark and the UK Youth Parliament here.

Thanks again!

Mae, Fiona and CYC 🙂

An intro to CYC

August 19, 2015August 19, 2015Cardiff Youth Council

Hello!

I guess a good way to start off this blog, which we’ll hope to update for you weekly, is with a quick introduction to Cardiff Youth Council, who we are and what we’re all about! I’m not sure if you’ve heard the tagline before- if you haven’t, here it is- we are the official network for young people advocating positive change, to make Cardiff a better place to live, work, and play. In a sentence, that’s what we are… which doesn’t tell you much, so I’m gonna elaborate slightly.

Basically, it’s a youth forum, where young people from the age of 11, up to the age of 25 can meet with other like-minded young people to work on campaigns and issues in all forms. So basically, if you fit into that age bracket, live in and around Cardiff, and care about… a broad range of stuff, then this is the place to go, to get your voice heard and your opinions counted!

How do you fit in to all of this? We meet on a monthly basis- and if these meetings, or even a few of these meetings and involvement on social media are all you can commit to, that’s fine! Any involvement is great, as we function on having a big group representing the youth of Cardiff, working hard and making change happen! And we do make change happen, which is great, because what we do as young people is important, and deserves to be acknowledged, we deserve to see a response to the things we do! Additionally, we’ll be hurling opportunities your way, of various nature and theme, including exciting and interesting trips and visits, residential outings, and so on! Anybody can get involved- as well as representatives sent from schools and organisations across Cardiff, we’re also made up of lots of individuals from all backgrounds. We want our Youth Council to be as diverse, interesting and varied as our city is.

It’s super easy to get involved- you literally just turn up to one of our meetings! There’s absolutely no commitment to stay if you decide it isn’t for you, and any feedback you have would be appreciated regardless!

The next few dates for our meetings are September 23rd, October 14th, November 18th, and December 16th. Always on Wednesdays, always at the City Hall in Cardiff, always 4.30pm and ending before 7pm! Pop those dates in your calendars or phones, and see how you feel when they pop up! We’d love to see you there, (plus there’ll be free tea and biscuits, always a bonus, right?) We know how expensive public transport can be in Cardiff, in fact, it’s one of the issues brought up regularly in youth council, and we try to offer alternatives. If you present any bus or train tickets used to reach our meetings, we’ll reimburse them, as we wouldn’t like to put you out of pocket!

You can follow us on social media too, @CardiffYC on Twitter and like our Facebook page- We’d really appreciate the support!

Thanks so much for reading this far, and I hope we’ll see you really soon! If you have any questions at all, or if you just want to have a little chat about what we’re about, my name’s Maegan , I’m the chair of Cardiff Youth Council, you can email me on maegandaviesjohn@outlook.com at any time, you can also drop me a message on Facebook or whatever. If you’d like my number to discuss anything over the phone, I can email that over to you too. We’ll look forward to hearing from you!

Thanks again!

Mae and CYC 🙂