Weekly Update – 27/01/2020
Here’s to brighten your gloomy Mondays, considering the miserable weather, with our update on last week at TRAIN. Sessions held over the past few days have included:
- Head Start – young people at Willowcroft and All Saint’s primary schools were introduced to the topic of passive, aggressive and assertive behaviour – learning about the differences between different approaches to interacting with others. An assertiveness plan was created to educate the young people on how to go about being confident and standing up for themselves in a positive, non-aggressive manner. It was particularly brilliant to see certain young people coming out their shells more and also coming along to our Thursday Dinner and Debate session!
- Dinner and Debates – this week’s sessions involved further education on online safety, as well as lots of ice-breakers and get to know you activities, considering the new faces we were joined by! One of TRAIN’s Young Leaders also did a fantastic job helping out with the session again.
- Young Women’s and Young Men’s Group – considering Monday having been the annual ‘Blue Monday’, this week’s gender sessions focused on mental health and wellbeing. Young people demonstrated really positive involvement, offering really great ideas and some being particularly open. The photo above shows tags decorated by those at Young Men’s with various coping strategies each were encouraged to think up, to take up when dealing with low mood and self-esteem – really quite inspiring to read.
- What’s Up – another positive session of games and various critical discussions. It has been really great to have a number of young people regularly attending the sessions each week, creating a solid group for relationship building.
- Local detached and outreach – a number of our sessions around the town were fairly quiet this week, but still valuable for enabling us to meet new young people and continue building positive rapport with those already known to us. A couple also proved important for giving us an insight into matters of anti-social behaviour, which we were then able to address accordingly to reduce the risk of escalations.
- One to one mentoring at UTC – continued mentoring took place with a number of young people at the college, to continue work to build and boost the wellbeing, self-confidence and positive aspirations of each.
As always, please feel free to get in touch with us if you have any questions at all, anything from our volunteering opportunities to our youth work schedule, or if you are interested in signing up to receive email reminders for the Weekly Update and/or our monthly newsletter. We are also now on LinkedIn so welcome follows from those who have accounts! https://www.linkedin.com/company/didcot-train-inspiring-young-people
Another notice to highlight is that VOXY (Voice of Oxfordshire’s Youth) and The Children’s Trust are looking for feedback from all children and young people in Oxfordshire about how supported they feel by the services they use – head here for further information.
Thank you for your support and we hope you all have really great weeks.
Kind regards,
The TRAIN Team
