Woodcraft Folk Youth Participation weekend

Myself and Ellen from the NDCS Youth Advisory Board went to a youth participation event in the Peak District near Sheffield run by a youth adventure and leadership organisation called "Woodcraft Folk", in order to represent the NDCS with Jo's help. It was an inspirational weekend with a number of other charities and organisations attending to exchange views and strategies in getting more young people involved in various projects up and down the country.

The weekend involved a number of discussion topics, especially centred around the idea of building up confidence in young people and how to get young people actively involved in projects run by the organisations. Also, there were presentations given by each organisation in workshops that were spread out through the two days, which gave us a real insight into the aims and strategies of other organisations and the challenges that they faced when trying to involve young people.

When the NDCS were asked to conduct a mini-workshop, me, Ellen and Jo stepped up to the responsibility and organised a couple of fun activities in order to help the other organisations to understand what being deaf is all about and also to promote deaf awareness within these organisations. Firstly, we played a game where the participants had to stand in a line and arrange themselves into alphabetical order by surname without speaking or miming, in other words, encouraging them to act things out in order to communicate amongst each other. It was a really interesting game and the participants found this particularly difficult although the correct solution was found and we gave ourselves a pat on the back!! Then, we introduced a harder game with a purpose of helping the participants to gain an idea of just how difficult lip-reading can be. The participants had to get into groups, where two people would receive a card, each with a list of words and phrases which they then had to mime using their lips in order to get the other person in the group to complete the action on the card. It was truly fascinating how the participants struggled to understand the lip patterns of even the most basic of words.

To conclude, I believe that we had achieved our aim to provide the other organisations with the relevant understanding in order for them to take young deaf people onboard in their project work. Also, we learnt a lot about the issues other organisations faced when trying to involve young people and we had long discussions about possible solutions to these issues. Overall, a fantastic weekend with inspirational charities and discussions and a thoroughly enjoyable experience for us. :D

Oh, and one more thing...in the evening, we had a debating session in order to understand what is meant by the term "putting your case forwards"...and things got rather heated...
The question that was debated:

"Are Jaffa Cakes biscuits or Cake?"

And on that note, I'll leave you to dwell on this...





Cinema Subtitles Petition...

With all the current gossip about subtitles on live Tv and in particular Dancing On Ice - check out the story here at the Daily Mail - I thought maybe it was worth publicising the Youth Advisory Board's Cinema Subtitles petition.

Last year at the very first YAB residential in London we realised that as a group we were all extremely passionate about the lack of access for deaf young people (and older people!) to cinema. We discussed all the issues: films available, times of films, travelling to the cinemas... and contacted other deaf young people in our areas to find out their views as well. I'm pretty proud to say that among us we managed to persuade over 500 people to sign a paper petiton arguing that access to subtitled cinema needed to be improved.

At our July residential we discussed how we could take forward the campaign and togther we set up an online petition which you can sign here at campaign to increase the frequency of subtitles cinema showings. We began posting the petition on facebook and twitter and as a result nearly 300 more people have signed up!!

But! We still think more needs to be done to improve access to cinema and we need your help!
Why not...

• sign the peitition yourself
• share it with all your friends - we could easily get 100s more signatures of this happened!
• write to your local cinema and ask them to show more subtitles films
• or even set up a meeting with the manager of your local cinema and tell them about the issues: most films are late at night, popular films aren't subtitles etc... 

This way we can improve the quality of access for all deaf people - I know this is an area with strong opinions. Many people argue that subtitles are distracting and many cinemas are afraid that they will lose profit by showing more subtitled films; however, there is a market out there! About 9million people in the UK are deaf or "hard of hearing" - and thats alot of signatures!!

Thank you :)

2011-2012 Final Event!

This weekend 11 members of the YAB chugged and flew to Birmingham for the final -official- 2011 to 2012 YAB event.

The event was held at The Studio in central Birmingham - an amazingly colourful and inspiational building fillied with bean bags, a wii, a punch bag, inspirational quotes and as much hot chocolate as you could possibly drink!

As this was the final weekend the main focus was on evaluation but there was still plenty of opportunity to learn new skills and on Saturday we took part in a workshop run by the NDCS campaigns team on the change from DLA to PIP. It was definetely a workshop that made us sit up and think as we realised that nearly all of us would not qualify for PIP - maybe this is something the new board should be campaiging about! And we certainly gave Jess from campaigns plenty to think about!!!

The NDCS staff had set up a timeline of all the events and campaigns we had been to or run throughout the last year and it was amazing to think back on EVERYTHING we had managed to cram in! Certainly an awful lot of stuff!!

Throughout this year the YAB have had 4 residentials; been represented at the Scottish Festival of Politics, the Lib Dem Conference, the Cyber Space Conference, Internet Safety Week and many other events and also managed to fit in an amazing cinema subtitle campaign alongside other deaf awareness campaigns! - I'd say that was quite an achievement!

Also at the weekend were NDCS audiologist Vicki and Remark (a deaf run film and media company). With Vicki we made a series of videos explaining how equipment such as radio aids works, how you can retube your hearing aid and also a number of deaf awareness tips! All of which will feature on the NDCS Buzz website.
As well as this Remark also filmed all the activities that took place and an indiviual evaluation of our time on the board which will be used to encourage new young people to join the board.

"I have had such a fantastic experience on the board, meeting loads of new people, boosting my confidence and helping the NDCS to campaign for things that really affect young deaf people all over the UK. What a year it's been, too much has happened to put it into a few lines and words do very little justice to the hard work we all put in and the memories that we got out of it, which we will cherish forever!" - Andrew

On Saturday evening we also found time to go bowling at the Leisure Box to relax and catch up with another member Tom who has his maths exam today - Good luck!! Meaning he couldn't attend all weekend. It was an awesome time and there were a lot of funny moments - all of which were caught on camera!!

 On Sunday afternoon we had a presentation and Thank You! session where we were all presented with bright blue YAB hoodies and listened to a rap written by the NDCS staff telling us all their favourite bits from the year!! - Very funny!
As a group we gave the staff a photobook Ellen had made and which we had all written our own personal messages in - were going to miss our brilliantly inspiring staff!!

Finally we all took part in a superb African Drumming workshop which threatened to bring down the whole building with noise and vibrations!!! Definetely a very memorable end to an amazing weekend! - But lets not forget the very tasty cake the staff had also bought us!

And don't despair!! Because this is most definetely NOT the end of the -vintage original- YAB; there will be much much more from us in the future!