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.
