Youth initiatives in Gore

Blue Light has come to Gore

Blue Light has helped create a group which is youth led and supported by adults from different organisations within the community. Through this group, we have already held two camps and an Interschool social this year. The social was led by a group of six 12 and 13 year olds, and was a huge success. The young people came up with the idea of the social to meet their frustrations of not being able to meet other young people in their district who were not at their school.

Gore District Youth Council

The Gore District Youth Council in partnership with the Gore Social Sector Trials led and delivered a range of events in our community over the last year. Before events were planned, the young people involved attended an event planning workshop run by Venture Development. After the programme ended they also attended a post evaluation workshop to debrief on how they felt the programme went and to provide their feedback.

Events that were organised included:

• Gore Youth Awards and after party
• Ice Party
• Youth Week activities including, movie night, Pink shirt day and Community Mufti day
• Interschool Neon Social
• Kids Zone bus trip
• Stewart Island Weekend Camp.

Over the last year we had around 600 young people aged 12-24 takepart in our youth led events. We had over 35 young people trained to deliver these events. The Youth Council are keen to pass on their knowledge gained from the programme through mentoring of future Youth Councillors, workshops, written documents and presentations to other youth groups. The Youth Councillors all agreed that the programme was important for their age groups, due to having more things to do in the area that do not involve alcohol or drugs.

Passing on knowledge

During our evaluation workshop of the event, the young people came up with these ways to pass on their knowledge:

• keep folders and information about each event including its planning guide
• include as many people as possible to ensure sustainability
• create instructions/checklists/flowcharts for each event
• store lists/folders in several forms (hard copy,i-cloud,t-stick etc)
• have assigned changeover with incoming councillors
• one on one mentoring
• Powerpoints and presentations
• workshops with active learning games
• recruit a friend and guide them
• small work groups so it is not intimidating
• treasure hunt for information so it is fun and informative
• presentation to other youth groups and other youth councils
• plenty of visuals
• actively recruit people with strength based skill base
• open sessions ” eg. "Come and watch a youth council meeting".

The Gore Youth Council have delivered a presentation from start to finish on how to run an event such as the 'Gore Youth Awards' to another Youth Council. This is being done so other communities can learn from us if they intend on doing something similar.

Youth Council recruitment

Each year the Gore District Youth Council is advertised and recruites Youth Councillors from about February till the end of March. The young people spoke up and said they would like this changed for the following reasons:

• they want to be involved in the interviewing process of selecting potential youth councillors
• they want to be able to train future Councillors
• if the youth council is selected and ready to go it means three months at the start of the year isn’t wasted during this process.