Our vision is that we enable young people, especially those from tough realities, and the key adults in their life, to lead lives of purpose, meaning, and contribution.
And we know from our own and external evaluations, that young people emerge from our academies with greater confidence, clarity about their goals and a renewed sense of purpose, ready to make a positive difference in their own lives and communities.
So, it was with pleasure that we attended the Connected2Care Conference in June, which had been planned and designed by young people with care experience across Inverclyde as part of their Columba 1400 leadership experience.
After completion of Phase Two of their values-based leadership academy, and in collaboration with Proud2Care, the IPromise team, Inverclyde education services, Inverclyde Health and Social Care Partnership, Your Voice and Inverclyde Council as well as Columba 1400, the young people met several times to shape the design and delivery of the conference.
Their agreed aim for the conference was to explore care experience and how our workforce, schools and communities can better support care-experienced children, young people and their families to thrive. They agreed on keynote speakers, what topics to explore, what the workshops would look like, what roles they’d like and who should be invited.
We can say that without a doubt, the young people succeeded and surpassed their aims. They wanted to bring together those involved in their care, and had more than 100 attendees from social work, housing, further education, employability, emergency services, Children’s Hearings and third-sector organisations. They shared a clear schedule, planned in warm welcomes and fun activities as icebreakers, were creative in their presentations and thoughtful in their choice of keynote speakers.
These included Beth-Ann McDowall from IncludEm, Laura Beveridge from The Promise Scotland and James Docherty from Community Justice Scotland. All three shared their lived experience of care – their stories were powerful and emphasised the importance of giving voice to young people, and listening, observing, recognising stigma and building relationships and connections.
As Beth-Ann said: “The best relationships are not measured by the good times. Rather those who had the persistence to show up, speak up and never shut up.”
The young organisers had also thought of useful workshops to break up the auditorium sessions and found creative ways to get attendees talking about how to build connections, suggestions for how to deal with stress and what makes a good throughcare worker. They peppered these with wee gifts and takeaways as reminders of the day.
It was an incredible event and as Your Voice Inverclyde tweeted: “Young People are not the leaders of tomorrow. They are the leaders of TODAY & tomorrow💪”
We couldn’t agree more 😀
