Here at Say It With Your Chest we believe that all young people should be empowered to be the best version of themselves. Despite Covid-19 making it hard to work with young people in person we do not want the pandemic to stop young people from receiving the support that they need. This is why we are extremely excited to announce that after doing a successful pilot in October 2020, next month we will be launching online personal development workshops for young people aged 11-25.
Pilot workshop
We presented 10 different topics to the Mayor of London’s Violence Reduction Unit’s Youth Action Group and we asked them to chose the two topics which they believed would be most beneficial for their young people. They chose:
- Resilience
- The importance of effective communication
When the young people were asked what their biggest takeaway from ‘the importance of communication’ workshop was, participants said:
“It opened my eyes to the problems with the way I communicate and why they cause issues when I’m trying to resolve conflict, so I thought about what I would change”
“ It taught me several ways to conduct myself in different situations.”
“I learnt that good communication gets you far. I also learnt that not being aggressive gets people to hear your point effectively without having to argue.”
Similarly, we asked participants what their biggest takeaway was from our ‘resilience’ workshop, with answers including:
“You can reach out to people, it’s important to know when you need help and you don’t need to do everything on your own, despite the success rate of that working in the past as it can be really stressful.”
“As long as you have the work ethic and goal you can achieve anything. We all have the potential to do whatever we want; it’s just about applying ourselves to every opportunity and supporting each other along the way.”
“I learnt a lot about how different people respond to failure and it made me think about how I can use these techniques to make myself more resilient.”
The below pie chart shows the responses that the participants gave when asked to rate the workshops out of 10, 1 is the lowest score and 10 is the highest score. As you can see, the majority of the young people scored the online workshops 10/10, with an average overall score of 9.3/10.
Jerome Harvey-Agyei , who is the children & young people participation officer at the Mayor of London’s Violence reduction Unit said:
“Say It With Your Chest, ran a workshop with our young people from the London Violence reduction unit’s youth action group on the importance of effective communication and resilience. The online workshop was different from other sessions that the young people have attended. This is because it was really engaging using a variety of creative tools and games/exercises to capture the attention of the group as well as deliver messages in a way that leaves an impact. Say It With Your Chest’s approach was relaxed, friendly, relatable and real! There was a fine balance of material that helped to drive home the intended outcomes.”