Login
To establish a sustainable youth group in the community
Our Social Issue
We struggled to decide on one social issue. We first discussed the lack of spaces for young people in town. But the more we talked to others and the more concrete our ideas became, the more we realised two things: it’s a huge issue that we might not be able to solve and maybe it isn’t actually our issue?! We discovered that there are a lot of programmes on offer for youth but organisers are struggling to engage participants! So where is this contradiction coming from? People say “There’s nothing to do for youth” but when there is, nobody goes. In conversation we realised that some of us don’t actually want public spaces for youth. We talked about our social anxiety, fear of meeting new people and the need to make our group a safe space for young people who might not fit in everywhere all the time. New task: Make this group a safe space and sustainable with enough participants to justify the resources going into it.
Who We Worked With
• Aga Piwowarczyk: facilitator for gardening and soil science • Aisling Heraughty, Ocean FM podcaste: facilitator for podcasting • Angela Horgan: YSI coordinator • Brendan Lynch, Sligo PPN (Public Participation Network): facilitator for public participation and power • Classmates and other friends: we invited them to the group • Community Training Centre: another YSI group in Sligo who visited the community garden • Connie Nell: Co-op’s community development worker • Éadaoin Dooley: facilitator for creative mindfulness • Eamon Ryan: Minister for the Environment • LCYP (Local Creative Youth Partnership MSLETB): funders for resident facilitator and video & podcasting equipment • Léargas: funders for materials and facilitators (Oct-Dec 2022) as part of European Year of Youth • Micheál Kenny (Foróige / NWRDATF - Northwest Regional Drug and Alcohol Task Force): offered future collaboration with us • Parents: we talked to them about the challenge and they gave feedback (see below) • Roux Mellet: facilitator for mural art • Ruairí Breslin: resident facilitator, present at all sessions, often joined us as a participant to bump up numbers for group and pair work etc. • Ruth Quinn (ATU Sligo): facilitator for environmental engineering and nature-based solutions • TY students in the Ursuline College in collaboration with Youth Work Ireland: funders for materials and facilitators (Jan-Feb 2023)
How We Communicated
We met once a week and most weeks we had an external facilitator in. We told them about our YSI issue(s) and week after week we discussed new challenges! We also went to the Ursuline College for a group interview with a TY project and secured some funding through that. We told them all about our project, our ideas and our challenges up to that point. We created some posters together to advertise our group and used the Co-op’s social media. The main message of our communication was: there is a group here for young people, all (13 to 16 years old) are welcome, please join us. When we heard that Minister Eamon Ryan was going to visit the Co-op, we created a poster for him. We also featured in one of Aisling’s radio episodes on Ocean FM where we discussed waste, recycling and relevant SDGs. Check out episode 6 here: https://www.oceanfm.ie/2023/04/22/future-fix/
Our Innovative Action and Impact
As explained above, we did not just work on one social issue. Our main challenge became to make our group sustainable. If all current participants continue to come, we believe that we have succeeded and the group has a future. During the various sessions, we tackled social issues in the areas of soil and water quality, mental wellbeing, discrimination, spaces for youth, crime, the housing crisis, xenophobia and others. We did so by small creative acts which helped our own group and which spread a message. Posting about our activities makes the wider local community see what we are doing and helps improve the image of teenagers in the area. This is also true when they see us work in the garden or prepare pizza at a community event. Our activities have been embedded in other community development work that the Co-op does, e.g. in the community garden, with community members of all age groups.