Youth Advisory Forum 2024 Highlights
As we near the end of 2024, it is a great opportunity to take a look back over the last year and reflect on the progress of the Youth Advisory Forum. This year the Youth Advisory Forum held nine meetings discussing many subjects and economic matters, sharing views and recommendations from a young person’s perspective.
At the start of the year our members participated in four training sessions with Sleeping Giants, teaching them the skills to develop their confidence, build resilience as well as looking at personal strategies on how to avoid feelings of imposter syndrome. These skills will help build the foundations for our young people to support them through their careers and life situations, well done to everyone who attended!
In the summer it was time to celebrate the achievements of Jake and Lewis who gained their Participative Democracy Certificate qualifications, another proud moment, celebrated by everyone.
Over the year the Youth Advisory Forum have worked with a range of external partners including Open University in Scotland, South of Scotland Regional Economic Partnership, Dumfries and Galloway Local Employability Partnership, NatureScot and the Crichton Foundation. The group also worked with internal SOSE colleagues to advise on decisions being made in different parts of the organisation.
In October we celebrated One year of the Youth Advisory Forum in Dumfries and Galloway, what a quick year it was with some much gained and more to come!
With the success of the Forum in Dumfries and Galloway it was time to focus on recruiting our Scottish Borders Forum members and after a six week recruitment campaign it was great to announce our new Scottish Boders Youth Advisory Forum with new members Sacha, Beth and Callum. We didn’t stop there over in Dumfries and Galloway we recruited two new members, Hamish and Jameson.
Another great moment this year to highlight was when representatives from the Forum attended the launch of a very special boat! The boat had been built using traditional boat building skills by a group of young people, this was delivered by Building Futures Galloway, a project that the Forum chose to support with funding.
To finish the year, two Forum members have now been allocated a mentor from the SOSE team to build on their personal growth and development through a mentoring programme.
Phil McCreadie, Head of Business and Enterprise and Jayne Ashley, Head of Natural Capital will support and help them learn more about the sectors they are interested in and help them develop their careers.
What a year it has been and we can’t wait to see what 2025 has to bring!