St Albans Youth Council

We had another productive meeting tonight. We're putting the final touches to our Mental Health Project report and discussed other matters such as another Mi-Pod event, the Pioneer and Herts1125

Two websites that we found interesting!!

http://whosbored.org/

http://www.time-to-change.org.uk/

On Saturday the 18^th of June, many of our SAYC members braved the torrential rain at the St Albans Arts Festival at Verulamium Park. We ran several activities at our stall. Particularly successful were our Hoopla and Fishing Ducks games.  These proved to be a huge success with many children and a substantial amount of adults too! We also sold bright and stylish T shirts, kindly donated by Garden Fields Primary school.

As well as our exciting fairground games, we also conducted surveys in our Mi Pod, a blow up igloo designed so that we can interview people confidentially. These surveys were conducted as part of our Mental Health Project. Our aim today was to research young people’s attitudes to, and awareness of counseling support in the local area and within their schools.  This research will help to inform our project and when completed will be complied into data that will be sent to local schools and the District Council. For many of us, this has been our first experience of interviewing people in this spontaneous situation and it was a great opportunity to improve our confidence and social awareness.

All in all, the day was a huge success; the games were highly popular and we raised in excess of £150 for Youth Talk, a charity enabling young people to speak to someone about their problems. Not only was the day a fundraising accomplishment, but an example of effective teamwork, dedication and of course, powering through the pouring rain and carrying on!

Hello there!

We've decided to start a series of regular blogs to keep you updated about what we're up to, and I'm kicking things off, being our resident techie and all that :p

We had a meeting yesterday, the 3rd of May, at Fleetville Community Centre, a new venue for us as we were unable to use our usual spot at the District Council because of the elections.

We had a few new faces around the table, which is always nice We were joined by Beth, Sophie and Shaahida. Look out for their blogs coming soon!

So what did we actually discuss? Well you can read the full minutes here, but briefly:

Our mental health project

• We discussed which schools and year groups we'd like to test out our questionnaire on
• We decided to trial with year 8's and year 10's, so if you're in those years we'll be hearing from you soon!

Website Update

• I gave a brief update about our lovely new website
• We discussed the idea of these blogs and thought it would be a good way for us to communicate with you and keep you updated with everything we do
• We discussed the possibility of adding a discussion board to this site, which may be coming in the future. If you think one would be a good idea then let us know in the comments below

School Newsletters

• We chatted about our advert that we're hoping to get into school newsletters as soon as possible, so keep an eye out for that as well

That's pretty much it from this meeting, apart from all the cookies and doughnuts we ate. Thanks to the Fleetville Community Centre for letting us use their building for the meeting.

Thanks for reading and I look forward to telling you more! Make sure you add our facebook page (link's on the right) to keep up to date with all the latest for young people in St Albans