Weekly Update – 31/03/2020
We hope you are keeping well considering things at the moment. With the increasingly stringent government guidelines, TRAIN’s Trustees came to the decision last week to pause all face to face aspects of our delivery for the time being, abiding by their duty of care to staff and the young people TRAIN supports.
In order to ensure staff can continue to reach out to young people and vice versa, for now we have made the switch to running all provision virtually – please see our current programme below. It is obviously a learning process adjusting to this online format, but we were really pleased by the engagement we came to have across the week.
Staff largely focused on checking in with young people, considering the huge change in lifestyle each are facing. Over the week many conversations were held with young people and a range of tools experimented with, from games to group chats, to explore what engagement methods and activities are of most interest to them. Live social media videos proved to be particularly great for running a number of activities including:
- Joining in on the colourful message being spread nationally using rainbow drawings – young people joined Charlotte drawing their own to display in their windows as a sign of hope
- Treasure Hunt – a number had a great time running round their homes excitedly searching for the 10 items given to them to find by Lisa and Charlotte
- Clap for the NHS – many joined Charlotte for the hugely worthy clap the country carried out for the NHS last Wednesday
- Daily Plan tutorial – young people were shown how to plan their days in a creative and fun way, empowering them to take a positive approach throughout this period and instead embrace it as a time for personal growth.
Digital platforms also have their benefit in enabling Justina to continue one to one mentoring sessions with a number of the young people she has been working with at UTC. We hope to take up a number more for sessions over the coming few weeks also.
We look forward to the coming week to plan more bits and pieces for the young people to look forward to.
If you have any questions about what we will be offering online for the week ahead, please do get in touch. Otherwise, thank you as ever for your support. It has been so brilliant to see the sense of community that has grown throughout this period so far, from all working to bring out the positive in the negative!
Take care,
The TRAIN Team
