Last Thursday heralded our latest community forum day at Ashfield YOI. Once again there was an excellent turn out and the attendance from many of the prison staff allowed for a purposeful day with many of our community partners, looking at how we need to work together to offer the best services for young people leaving prison. We had many great organisations attending from housing and drugs projects such as the YMCA, Gloucester Housing, ARA and Brook sexual health service to digital and creative media organisations such as the BBC, Signpost, Inspire Trust and the Handsin Group plus many more.

Justin from 2nd Chance kicked off with a few warm up activities which livened things up and then representatives from all the organisations present were subjected to giving a 30 second pitch to our Dragon's Den panel consisting of 6 young people in Ashfield who are currently engaged with 2ndChance. They gave their critique on the services on offer, with comments ranging from; "Let me tell you where I am..." to "Where do I sign?” It was a nerve racking experience for many of the attendees but all done with a sense of fun and enthusiasm, as special mention should go to the YMCA representative who went in feet first with props and songs, encouraging a lot of audience participation!

In the afternoon everyone split into working groups of 5 or 6, each with a young person, where they discussed services, issues and ideas around helping young offenders on release and also suggested ideas of how they would like to see the community forum developing. Many commented on how valuable it was to listen to the opinions of the young people and the lads clearly enjoyed chatting to everyone and having the chance to talk to such a vast range of organisations and people meant a lot to them. Justin spoke to them later that evening and they were all still buzzing with ideas and were inspired by all the kind of projects they could be involved with. All 6 young men are currently involved on a steering committee to help drive forward a MediaBox bid which invests in sustainable creative media projects for young people. More news will follow on this bid in a few weeks time...
If you want to get involved in the next forum, email Justin for more details. The next forum will take place early summer, for just the morning and somewhere in the community. We had some great feedback about how enjoyable the day was and a lot of the issues raised will be put into a report and published on the website soon.

Posted: 04.03.10 09:29