Morden Youth Coronavirus Support Project

Background

Because of COVID-19’s pandemic, our community faces mounting issues of poor mental health for young people of Morden, south-west London. The closure of schools and colleges has removed regular routines, feelings of security and networks of friendships of children and young people. These experiences are necessary for young people to grow into responsible adults, making positive contributions to their local community.

Reaching out to Morden/Sutton Community

Mental Health has been one of the factors of the problems that has been created by the Coronavirus pandemic. Our project sought to address how young people’s mental health has been affected by this and created ways to support those affected.

As we reached out to the local community we realised how wide has been the mental health effects of the pandemic. In engaging our promotional campaign we were overwhelmed by the response of young adults. This affected the way in which this project was developed and the categories of young people we were able to reach out to.

Our initial plan was to work with young people from primary school age, through to high school and college. We soon found that the feedback from our marketing campaign and volunteer street team appeared to overwhelmingly attract young people of senior school and college age. This resulted in our project content being geared towards supporting young people who were worried about their future prospects. Amongst the young people who responded to our campaign were those who dropped out of school towards the end of the prescribed but interrupted by the pandemic. Plus those at college were requesting support for opportunities to enter the world of employment.

Employability Skills

Learning to obtain the skills and personal development to be able to make positive contributions within a workplace. These were important as many young people were being affected by the closure and changes of their formal academic experiences. There was growing cases of young people losing complete faith in education and struggling to find employment routes.

Digital Broadcast Skills

Learning to adapt and develop skills to enable young people to forge a career within the digital industry. We found that with the exposure that young people have within social media, they are aware of opportunities opening for them within the digital sector. Hence a demand for our digital course content was developed to help the young people work towards those opportunities that were not presenting themselves during formal education.

October 23, 2020 Project Comments Off on Morden Youth Coronavirus Support Project

Healthy Growing Project

Nearly a third of British adults grow their own food, with many believing it to be healthier, a study suggests. This project aims to encourage young people to grow their own food, namely fruit and veg, in a way that promotes healthy eating and a more natural diet.

Our idea is to get youth more enthusiastic about growing fruit and veg. This project will be giving young people an insight into what goes into the fruit and vegetables that are typically purchased at supermarkets every day. In addition, this project will encourage young people to get outside and enjoy nature and fresh air instead of being indoors or glued to mobile devices.

The project will be run as a series of workshops and seminars delivered by volunteers trained in gardening and nutrition. To give a more practical view we will invite local allotment owners as guest speakers to talk about their experiences with growing food. The workshops will be geared to help young people to develop an appreciation of fresh fruit and vegetables.

Another aspect of this project is the setting up of local youth farmers market. We will help those who want to take the project to the next level to create a one page business plan to outline how they can take these produce to local farmers markets to raise money to support a charity of their choice. There will also be a session where the young people visit a local allotment to get hands on experience during the project by taking part in some outdoor gardening.

The main topics to be covered include:

The benefits of growing your own veg

Guide to growing own veg

Simple and tasty recipes

Nutrition and positive eating habits

How to access or rent an allotment – Information from Bromley Allotment and Leisure Gardens Federation

Youth Farmers Market business plan

May 25, 2020 General, Project 7 comments

Youth Digital Training Project

We set up a project that will produce an event entirely created by social media, using only their mobile phones. This project will create 50 creative micro-businesses who will all learn to use social media to run business based events. The young people involved will have responsibilities within the event planning and development, with each role leading to an online business opportunity.

Those on the project will just need a mobile phone. We will establish 7 groups of 8 young people to make up the different parts of the project. Within each group they will learn how to create a business The sections of the project delivery that they will be divided into are as follows:

  1. Event planning: The event’s theme is to showcase good local unsigned talent. This team will use social media to identify the performers they will like to feature within the event
  2. Business planning: The whole team will decide on the set up of the project, the name they would want to use and the logo. The whole team will create a 1-page business plan using online pointers. This will include selecting the appropriate branding to meet the project’s theme
  3. Design: The marketing material will be created with designs to be made appropriate for a viral campaign. The design ideas will be sourced online and created to be spread throughout social media
  4. Film making: The campaign will feature a filmed promotional advert that will be based on Youtube. This will be created, filmed and edited on our mobile phones and circulated through sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram
  5. Sourcing facilities: Using the internet to source services for the event
  6. Database building: This part of the team will focus on building up the database for the project to target young people, potential sponsors and performers
  7. Knowledge of online financial structures: Within this section of the project the young people will learn how to set up trading accounts online. 
  8. The event will be filmed to be reported/commented on social media
  9. Each of the above sections will be linked to web design tools. This will enable the young people to take what they have learned within the section then move on to create their own business.

The difference made to the young people will be that they will be in positions of being able to establish an online micro-business straight after this project using all of this experience. They will have learned state of the art social media and design skills with just their mobile phones. This will give the young people the confidence to apply for positions requesting these skills also, thereby improving their own employment prospects.

This project is needed as it is a great opportunity for young people to gain access to a range of in-demand skills for employment as well as being able to venture into online new business start-ups. By breaking down the steps to putting on an event this project also identifies areas where the young people may have skillsets which they may not realize they already have. They can also identify where they may have transferrable skills that can be used within various parts of the Digital industry.

March 23, 2018 Bussiness, General, IT Comments Off on Youth Digital Training Project