As part of our commitment to ensuring youth voice is at the heart of everything we do, we have set up a Youth Leadership group to help steer us. The group consists of In Focus team members alongside our Trustee lead for Youth Leadership and Participation, Harry Holder who is a young person, and 5 young people who have participated on our programmes or done work experience with us.
Following on from earlier conversations with our young trustees we wanted to explore not only how we bring in the voice of young people to the front of In Focus to drive how we develop moving forward, but also to give back by supporting the growth of young people through a Pathway working towards experiencing and developing leadership skills.
We started the session looking at our current suite of digital badges and what transferable skills they currently support. Interestingly this started a discussion about their need to better understand what digital badges are and can do for them and how we need to communicate this better.
We had a really good discussion about what they feel are essential skills for leadership – which will help us look at how we can embed this into some digital badges.
There was also a discussion around how the pathway doesn’t have to solely consist of digital badges, but can include other experiences of professional activity that a young person may not have access to such as attending meetings, conferences and other professional work experiences.
We have agreed as a group to continue to meet quarterly to do this work.
