Involver

We had a great meeting with an organisation called User Voice last week.

Led by best-selling author, and ex-offender, Mark Johnson, they aim to reduce re-offending. Considering 75% of young offenders re-offend within two years of their release from prison, clearly an important job.

One of the ways they are doing this is through prison councils – like school councils but in prisons. And though their ‘users’ might be there for different reasons, talking about some of the similarities led to some really interesting discussions.

Prisons, like schools, have to listen to the views of their prisoners. Mark said that:

‘some Governors just get a couple of prisoners into their office to show that they are listening to their views. Other Governors might get together a forum of prisoners that they know will agree with them, to show they are listening’

Now go back and replace ‘Governor’ with ‘Headteacher’, and ‘prisoner’ with ‘student’. This sounds very familiar when thinking about student voice in schools.

So we’re going to help User Voice with resources for elections, and keeping prison councils energised. We’ll hopefully work with them on some regional youth events too later in the year.

Great to link up with such an inspiring organisation, and one involver can learn a lot from.

Greg

See:

http://www.participationworks.org.uk/spotlight-pwne-members/greg-sanderson-involver

Oh and also see Asher look very funny at:

http://changemakers.squarespace.com/professionals/2010/3/5/involving-changemakers.html

Aisha Forbes, a good friend of involver, is involved with Youth Producing Change this year.

It’s an innovative program of youth-produced short films from across the globe showcasing young people’s perspectives on human rights crises. Ten films will be shown from teen film makers from London, Mozambique and New York, and they will be present to participate in discussion following the screenings.

Screening takes place the Ritzy in Brixton (details on the facebook invite here) so get along if you want to learn more!

Big week for us last week – the Speaker’s School Council Awards was launched. This is the project that Parliament asked Asher and I to help with. The event was a real success, and the young people from Brecknock Primary School and Little Heath Secondary presented their projects brilliantly. It was also great to hear how passionate and driven the Speaker is to support education.

A good few MPs attended, as well as lots of important people in the active citizenship field. Jo Swinson MP (a passionate supporter of school councils and active citizenship) made a great video about the event – well done Jo!

And here’s the promo video for the Award:

After only a few days, over 500 schools have registered. Your school should too: visit http://speakersschoolcouncil.org to sign up, and please forward on to any teachers that you know!

This week we’ve moved in with Changemakers, an exciting and well-established charity who are based just up the road from our old office. They aim to create a world in which young people have the confidence to lead and everyone understands we need them to.

We’ve had several meetings with their Chief Exec Adam Nichols over the last few months, and he’s been really supportive of what we’re up to with involver (thanks Adam!). Having identified areas of common interest, they were kind enough to invite us in for a few months!

Anyway, it’s a cool office, everyone here has been really welcoming, and it’s a great and exciting opportunity for us to work together. We’re looking into how we might provide a joint service to schools, and also working on a new social enterprise project (more to come).

It’s also interesting to see how different organisations work in different ways – having worked in small offices (for charities), and big offices (for Government) it’s useful to see how an established and successful charity operates/moves forward. And get some tips! I have a theory that you can tell a lot about an organisation by who makes the tea and coffee – and here everyone makes it for everyone else (a good sign).

There’s a lot of crossover in our thinking, and we’re really pleased to be linking up.

Greg