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...