Weekly Update – 08/06/2020
We hope you are all still staying safe and keeping well as restrictions slowly lift. Last week here at TRAIN saw us run a variety of digital groups, hangouts, mentoring and more. In light of the conversations and actions that have been taking place globally these past days, equality and diversity became important themes in our various provisions.
Although young people may now be able to meet with friends again, within guidelines, and various other aspects of normality may be returning, with much else otherwise continuing to remain the same, we are remaining mindful of the circumstance’s continued potential effects on mental health. We are therefore ensuring we continue offering a good mix of both educational and fully fun focused positive activities for young people to connect with us through.
Staff also enjoyed a brilliant webinar on Friday hosted by Oxfordshire Youth led by The Abingdon Bridge, exploring ways of managing young people’s anxieties during lockdown and supporting young people during the easing of restrictions – the first in a series of related webinars hosted by Oxfordshire Youth.
By enhancing awareness around important topics including equality and diversity, we aim to grow young people’s confidence in being able to recognise their rights and injustices experienced by themselves and/or others and to reflect upon their own feelings in an informed way. Oxfordshire Youth have shared a link to some useful materials to aid some of these conversations with young people.
Our sessions over the week included:
- Interactive worksheets – Charlotte created a worksheet to encourage deeper thinking around equality, from explanations of key terms to the Equality Act 2010, and young people being prompted to have a think about how confident they feel in identifying inequality and Discrimination.
- Young Women’s Group
- Simple and fun art tutorials
- Instagram polls – this week’s debate polls tested young people’s knowledge on various statistics around race.
- Quizzes – Kahoots! quizzes offered another opportunity to grow understandings around equality, diversity and inclusion.
- Instagram lives – with Summer approaching, we showed young people how NOT to let upcoming festival cancellations get them down through a fun, festival themed live, filled with glitter, music quizzes and one very bold, bright make-up tutorial
- Baking tutorials – who doesn’t love a scone!
- Gaming – young men enjoyed joining Harry for some light-hearted gaming which aims to develop teamwork and communication skills.
Informal one to one conversations and mentoring sessions also continued to offer valuable opportunities to check in with young people and to support them with any concerns. Please click here for further details on how to make a referral for our more structured 1:1 mentoring programme.
Head to the following page to hear more about our current provision and how young people can get involved. If you have any questions for us, please always feel free to get in touch. Also please let us know if you are interested in being added to our mailing list to receive email notifications for the monthly newsletter and/or weekly updates!
Thank you as always for your support and we hope you all have lovely weeks.
Best wishes,
The TRAIN Team