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An insight into youth issues, volunteering trends, charity life and more from the UK charity YouthNet

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Thursday Nov 27, 2008

My new favourite video...

Every so often something comes along and "blindsides you on a some lazy Tuesday afternoon" (as I believe Baz Lurhmann once said). Anyway, this dropped into my inbox, and I have to say it's totally changed my perception of one charity as a result. It's a bit long, but worth it for the pay-off and the simple message at the end.

Posted by Olly Benson ( 1:58 PM ) Link to this post Comments[0]

Our ambitious plans for do-it.org.uk

We are very proud of our achievements at do-it.org.uk. Over the past eight years, with the support of our voluntary sector partners, we've built the UK's largest volunteering database, containing more than one million opportunities to volunteer.

But that's not all. We now have over 300,000 registered volunteers who apply for more than 30,000 volunteering opportunities with over 21,000 charities each month.

That's a lot of people, doing a lot of volunteering. But we're not ready to stop there. We believe volunteering can transform society, and we want to connect more people with the causes that need their help.

To help us do just that, we have launched a fundraising campaign that will help us revolutionise do-it.org.uk.

Some of our registered volunteers will have received an email about this campaign today. If you are one of them, I hope the email you received conveyed just how passionate we are about volunteering, and the difference it can make to the world.

We'll keep you updated on our plans for do-it.org.uk on this blog, but if you have any thoughts, ideas or suggestions, why not add them as a comment to this post?

Posted by Sam Thomas ( 1:02 PM ) Link to this post Comments[2]

Thursday Nov 20, 2008

Skills London

The team's just come back from the first day of Skills London, a careers fair for 14 to 19-year-olds at the ExCeL centre. This is our third Skills event since September – and we've had stands for TheSite.org and the Life Choices consortium at each of them.

On TheSite.org stand, we've got a laptop with the website on show. We're handing out postcards and taking orders from schools and colleges. We're telling young people about the Respect? campaign and getting them to sign our pledge. With each event I'm getting better at describing what TheSite.org in a couple of sentences. Forget 15 minutes of fame – here we've got 15 seconds to attract someone's attention or they'll move onto the next stand.

The Life Choices consortium stand allows us to get young people's thoughts on this exciting new project, which has been funded by The Vodafone Foundation and v. We've got two panels on the back wall. One says, 'What life choices do you need to make this year?'; the other says 'What would make these choices easier?' Visitors write their answers on post-it notes and stick them on the wall. They can also use do-it.org.uk to sign up to be a volunteer as a website or marketing adviser or a content creator for the new website.

The team on the Life Choices Consortium stand

The team on the Life Choices Consortium stand

Fiona, Rosie and Kuljeet on the Life Choices consortium stand this morning
With each event, I'm getting better at judging how many bags of sweets we'll need for a day, how many pens we'll lose, how long it'll take me to set up the laptops. You'd think after a while I'd get a bit blasé. But the great thing about a live event is speaking to so many different people – some of whom have heard about us before, some of whom are learning about TheSite.org and YouthNet for the first time. It's totally exhausting, but somehow it's also energising and inspiring as well.

We'll be on stand E54 at Skills London from 9.30am-3.00pm tomorrow and 10.00am-4.00pm on Saturday if anyone out there in the blogosphere wants to come by and say hello.

Posted by Natasha Judd ( 4:33 PM ) Link to this post Comments[0]

Tuesday Nov 18, 2008

Congratulations Jamie!

We had some news that put a spring in our step this today - one of our legendary Royal Parks Half Marathon runners, Jamie Markham, has been selected as Justgiving's "Fundraiser of the Month"!

Jamie went above and beyond the call of duty for YouthNet, raising well over £3,000 and recruiting another three runners for us in the process.

What makes this extra special for us is that the Royal Parks Half Marathon was our first "mass participation" fundraising event, and Jamie's contribution in terms of fundraising and recruiting other runners sent a long way to making the event a success for us.

In fact, you could say he really went the extra mile for YouthNet! (sorry - I'll get my coat).

Congratulations to Jamie and thanks to Justgiving for highlighting his fantastic support!

Posted by Sam Thomas ( 12:35 PM ) Link to this post Comments[0]

Thursday Nov 13, 2008

Newsflash: young people speak out

Even the most tough-nut, savvy Press Officer will tell you how difficult it is to influence the media. Imagine how powerless a young person with no industry experience feels to change what's in the news.

And yet quite a lot of what's in the news affects us. Reports swing between demands for tougher sentences on young criminals and polemic about the latest government policy to protect the young from themselves. Constantly discussed but rarely consulted, we're developing an image that we just don't recognise at all, and it's completely outside of our control.

Or is it?

YouthNet and the British Youth Council believe in helping young people to take control of their lives. That's why we started the Respect? Campaign, which has been seeking to end unfair representation of young people for over three years. This was our thinking:

Just like racism or homophobia, the current trend for youth-bashing is a form of prejudice. And like any other prejudice, it's not going to go away without a struggle. Of course those young people that go about their lives quietly doing good are not going to get the recognition they deserve, because at the moment they're not the ones writing the news.

The third phase of the Respect? Campaign is about admitting that it's really up to us to tackle misrepresentation actively. For some people, getting their opinion printed or published or even posted online would be like flying up to the clouds in an aeroplane and asking them not to rain. But it doesn't have to be like that. The campaign is providing information, guidance and suggestions about what we can do; here are some of them:

1) Tackle the mainstream media: writing a letter to the editor or posting a comment on internet news portals reaches a surprising number of people and can be quite a buzz.

2) Comment on blogs or start your own. The internet is a network of opinions where one person's views are as valid as the next. It's the news agenda, but not as we know it – open and democratic.

3) Volunteer: do-it.org has thousands of opportunities listed under 'Marketing, PR and Media'. By volunteering as a media assistant or doing shifts on your local hospital radio, you'll be getting yourself heard and gaining experience at the same time. Two birds, one stone, and no good excuses not to!

4) Sign our pledge to do some of these things: we're hoping 1000 people will join us. Join the Respect? Facebook group to find out more.

The big launch

After some practices (girls in front? Boys in front? People at the side? People holding it up?) we were joined by Martyn Lewis, the famous ex BBC broadcaster, to do his thing with the microphone. Once we'd all stopped messing about, we think the five or six photographers managed to get some nice, striking photos, while some of us stood on the street handing out flyers to young passers by, asking them to sign our pledge and get their voice heard too.

Getting noticed as a committed young person, and being at the centre of the media's attention for once, felt really good. Ok, maybe the front page was a bit ambitious...but a little effort could help other young people understand that it's our news too!

Today the weather was on our side as we launched the third phase of the campaign. Several members of the Respect? Young People's Advisory Group struggled up Fleet Street with a billboard designed to look like a huge newspaper front page. We wanted to go somewhere with a sense of the media's long tradition – a history we're hoping to change the digital age marches on.

Posted by Sophie Manning ( 11:29 AM ) Link to this post Comments[1]

Wednesday Nov 05, 2008

Engaging the digital natives

For the purposes of this piece, the digital natives are young people who have grown up not knowing a time when the internet and other digital technology hasn't been around. Let's focus on the opportunities that the internet is opening up. In particular:

The evolution of this new kind of online virtual reality
The step change in information and advice provision that the internet has enabled in a new more open society
The internet's social effects and how getting together in groups has got easier

Exploring the online virtual reality

Today young people are faced with living in a new kind of virtual reality- an online virtual reality.

It's important not to get carried away, virtual realities are nothing new: since humans have been able to imagine, virtual realities have existed. Art, fiction and dreams have all conjured up powerful 'virtual' realities down the ages.

But this new digital virtual reality is different.

It's persists (our lives lived in this virtual digital reality can stick around for a lot longer than we ever imagined)
It's searchable (not only does it stick around- we are getting cleverer at opening up this reality to new search technologies)
And it's coming to a home near you (anyone with online access can reach this information)

This is a virtual reality that is breaking down the conventional barriers between public and private lives. The boundaries between our public and private lives is blurring.

For example, who has a Facebook account with work friends and home friends, and has had some kind of situation where some of your home friends have posted a photo of you in a home friends kind of a party- and now your work friends get to see what you get up to at the weekend.

To give you another example, who checks private emails at work, or who gets work emails to a private email address?

Who knows who is reading your emails when you send them? You think you know, but how often have emails been forwarded on repeatedly to people the original sender of the email (you) never would have imagined might eventually read them? Who has hit the 'reply to all button' or replied to a group email list- thinking they were just replying to the sender?

Who has taken part in a online discussion in a chat session, discussion board or forum? Who do you know has seen what you wrote? You don't. Before, when you wrote an article in a newspaper or print publication or letter, you didn't know who read it either. The difference with digital is that we often kid ourselves that we do know to a greater degree than we should. Or may be our sense of security comes from far off and unclear consequences. This can lead to sharing parts of our private lives or thoughts that in days gone by we would never have dreamt of having done. In short, the line between our public and private lives is blurring.

As a result, if we want to engage young digital natives in our youth work, one of the first things we need to be able to do is consider their privacy and confidentiality. If you're looking at third party apps that are remotely hosted, the following offer options to limit access to the content you publish on the web:

Google Sites - allows you to create web pages and then control who can view and edit them. We've used Google Sites to set up a secure space online to help support peer advisors who answer relationships questions on advice service askTheSite
Vox - is blogging software that gives you the ability to set privacy controls for every post - let your friends see some, your colleagues others. You don't have to share everything with the world
Drop.io - allows you to fileshare simply, upload the files to a URL you create and then set an access password as necessary

Open Society

One of the things that gets people most excited about the web is that it promises to change our society. Let's get political for a second. One way of seeing society before the internet is to see it as a wheel or hub. At the centre of the wheel are the people who traditional have been the main sources of information in our society.

Information has been held centrally. However, since the invention of the printing press that model has progressively been challenged more and more. Now with the internet more and more people have the means to publish, the means to distribute what they publish and possibility to interact with their audience.

The possibility for access to all kinds of information we need in our day to day lives is unprecedented. Young people have an opportunity now, as we all do, to be empowered to make the choices that are appropriate to them in their circumstances.

For example, take financial information in a survey YouthNet conducted in partnership with Citizens Advice, young people told us that the internet was the first place they looked for financial advice, after parents and friends.

All this means today with potential access to an unprecedented level of information, we are faced with a new kind of problem: with this quantity of information out there now, how do we find the information we need, when we need it? In many cases it can seem like a case of information overload.

Three examples of where to start in the fight to make the firehose of online information manageable are:

Delicious.com - we've used Delicious to help manage the online resources we've collected whilst looking for support for our users to askTheSite, such as articles, videos, organisations and services
Advanced Google - may be pointing out that Google is a great way of finding needles in haystacks of info on the web is a bit like getting gran to suck eggs. However, many overlook a bunch of advanced Google features like restricting your search to a single domain or using related pages to pull up clean lists of similar organisations
Local advice finder - we offer access to UK Advice Finder (UKAF) for free on TheSite.org. UKAF is a database of advice services that the professionals use to identify support for their users
Socialmedian.com - is a brand new site just out of private beta that offers a fresh approach to collating and organising news information according to the topics and subjects that interest you

Group forming - getting social

The social effects of the internet are only really now being felt as this new technology is becoming bedded in to our technology today. Social uses of the new internet technology have in the past almost been an afterthought. Now, as Clay Shirky says in his book 'Here Comes Everybody', group action just got easier.

Shirky points out that one of the most powerful social networking tools on the internet has been the 'reply to all' button in email. It allows groups to be formed at the touch of a button. For the first time it was as easy to reply to everyone the sender of the message had contacted, as it was to contact the sender alone. This meant that groups could formed in an instant based on the fundamental equality that anyone could contact anyone else.

Now we're surrounded by social web applications like Facebook, MySpace and the others. But it's easy to forget that these have really only sprung up during the course of 2007. As far as designing a social web, it's really early days.

Shirky has done a lot to focus the debate on social effects of the internet. You don't need organisations to organize nowadays. A favourite example was the students who grouped together to campaign against the HSBC's decision to scrap its promised interest free overdrafts at the beginning of the student year in 2007.

What makes this new digital age of the internet particularly distinctive has been that not only can we publish and distribute quickly and easily; we can now congregate and interact with this content too. This means that any web page now effectively the seed of a new online community.

In the past, it's worth noting how many charities trace their beginnings back to a letter or article published in the pages of a newspaper, Amnesty International, War on Want and Rethink to name but a few. Now this same phenomenon continues but on a scale hitherto unimagined. Every news article published on the internet draws together people with diverse passions or interests by stimulating comments either directly on the same web page or indirectly on another blog.

Guide to Modding (moderating) on TheSite.org - Building community requires support for users, as well as security. In practical terms, this means that anyone who moderates needs to be able to offer support to users in need, not just to keep the community secure from spam or other kinds of abuse.

100 top learning tools - It's crucial to think through how we can make our opportunities for young people to engage also opportunities to learn. Jane Hart has one of the best run downs of great e-learning tools out there on the web.

Finally, the most important place to look for new web tools is of course from the young people themselves that we, as organisations, are hoping to engage. Sounds obvious - but in the new digital age whose social effects are only just being felt and understood, being driven by the needs and lives of young people is not just a question of good practice, it's about remaining relevant and being able to justify our existence.

Posted by Patrick Daniels ( 12:39 PM ) Link to this post Comments[0]

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