Minutes:
J Advani provided the forum with the following update;
This forum last received an update on the activities of the Youth Council in September 2014. Since then the Youth Council has maintained a visible and active presence within the Borough and worked to ensure the voice of young people is heard.
In September of last year we began to plan our involvement in the Europe-wide ‘Local Democracy Week’; this week long programme of activities is intended to introduce young people to the importance of democracy on a local level and educate them on how, even on trivial matters, their immediate community is influenced by the political environment which surrounds them.
Our approach to Local Democracy Week was to engage our peers in debate on local and national topics including the right to vote at 16 and the level of available facilities for young people in Oadby, Wigston and South Wigston. All of the Borough’s High Schools and Colleges were invited to send representatives of their respective student councils to this event to debate the proposed topics in a team format. Despite a poor turn out from the schools on the evening of the debate event however the youth council, including young people who attended solely for the debate aspect of the evening, took to the debate enthusiastically and raised some strong, well thought out and argued points.
As October rolled around we were made aware of the upcoming ‘Children Commissioner’s Takeover Week’ where young people throughout the UK are encouraged to ‘takeover’ a variety of roles at all levels. In previous years young people in other areas of the UK have took on roles including those of Inspector with their local Police, Chief Executives with Community Organisations, Principals in local schools and various roles in local businesses. As first time participants in the Takeover Week the Youth Council opted to explore the possibility of members chairing some of the regular meetings that take place within the Borough Council and, in November, the Wigston Resident’s Forum was successfully chaired by a member of the Youth Council, Lara.
December allowed us to take to the streets of South Wigston during Christmas Capers to canvas resident’s opinions on youth related issues in the Borough and promote the work the Youth Council undertake (as well as see the Transformers!). The information collected during Christmas Capers will be used to help informed the work we undertake in 2015.
With the change from 2014 into 2015 came time to orientate ourselves toward a new, long term campaign following the focus we placed on improving the bus services within the Borough. Whilst our Arriva campaign will continue it was decided in our January meeting to spend 2015 raising money, and awareness, for homelessness schemes such as Shelter. Current ideas include raising money via both Supersonic Boom and potentially having members of the Youth Council spend a night out to understand how it feels to rough sleep; this is, however, a campaign still in development.
The Chair added that having the Youth Council spend a night sleeping rough for the night required an in-depth risk assessment to be developed by M Smith and would not take place if the risk was too great.
Members queried the response of Arriva to the Youth Council’s campaign; J Advani clarified that Arriva have promised several changes but an update requested in time for this forum regarding their implementation was not provided.
M Smith added that members of the Youth Council will soon be ‘Mystery Shopping’ Arriva to see if the promised changes have been implemented. The results of this undertaking will be shared with the forum.