Birmingham Leadership Foundation hosted a debate asking “what does it mean to be a Brummie?” at their third Monday Masterclass at the end of August in Handsworth. I shared my notes from the debate last month. This video by Punk Zebra gives you a great flavour of the debate and the passion that young people have for the city.
The masterclasses are a mix of inspiring talks from young leaders and entrepreneurs, together with a social media surgery run by Podnosh.
The debate was part of the MyBrum consultation, led by Councillor Waseem Zaffar for Birmingham City Council’s new social cohesion and community safety scrutiny committee.
Councillor Waseem Zaffar has been leading MyBrum, a consultation by Birmingham City Council’s new social cohesion and community safety scrutiny committee asking the simple question:
“What does it mean to be a Brummie?”
I was at Birmingham Leadership Foundation‘s Monday Masterclass in Handsworth last week (Podnosh provide social media help at the events) and helped social report the debate on “What does it mean to be a Brummie?”
There was a good mix of civic and young leaders giving their opinion. Here are my notes paraphrasing the debate:
Birmingham Leadership Foundation helps new and aspiring leaders to emerge. They connect emerging leaders with established leaders to help them learn from each other’s experience.
They organise networking events, training and connect existing leadership development projects to encourage the next generation of leaders in Birmingham to develop – leaders who reflect the city’s demography. These could be:
A young person aged 16–30 with the ideas, ambition and spark to make an improvement to the lives of others in their local community.
A person who is proactive in their community.
A chief executive or senior manager of a private company or public sector organisation who wants to work with, and support, the local community but lacks the know how and contacts.
Nick and I ran a social media surgery at the Foundation’s first Monday Masterclass last month. We’ll be working with the young leaders at the upcoming Masterclasses, sharing social media skills to help them get out there, network, collaborate and make things happen.
We’re also helping the Foundation team with their social media strategy and to further develop their own social media skills.
Sue Beardsmore spoke to a class of primary school children in Birchfield, asking the children to tell her what they think of school, the city of Birmingham and what they hope to do when they grow up.
Sue tabulated the answers into a spreadsheet and I’ve had a quick play at visualising one question in the text data: “what do you think school is for?”
Here’s the result (click the link to view the image at full size). I used a word tree in Many Eyes to choose a starting keyword, in this case “learn”, and then view the children’s answers in context to the keyword.
I really like the word tree format (say over a word cloud) as a way to understand context of the text I’m interested in.
Do you need some help making sense of your data? Talk to us.
Big Society champion appointed Government advisor – Nat Wei, one of Teach First's founding team, has been appointed as the new Government adviser on Big Society and a member of the House of Lords.
Conceptual inclusion – "Language such as ‘be on’ is one of the many barriers groups face and it’s one of the reasons I enjoy volunteering as a surgeon because it really gets you thinking about how often and how easily you use words or phrases that seem commonplace but are in fact jargon to many and the session presents an opportunity to explain or discuss the terms properly. The digital world is moving so quickly that it isn’t just new words needing to be learnt but whole other ways of thinking,"
duncanhodgson.co.uk – "online youth work is the most valuable tool I've used in a long long time" – Let's not forget that!
Jenni Rowley, isn’t your average 20-something woman. She spends her evenings out on the streets in Northfield, trying to prevent Anti Social Behaviour and crime in the area and getting young people involved in a number of projects. One of these projects is the Beyond Midnight Bus, which parks up in Northfield, kitted out with DVD players, stereo, internet and recording studio and has become a place for young people to hang out and talk about what they want to see in their area.
As a support worker for INVOLVE (while she is not in her day job in property management), a community group in the Northfield area which aims to help get funding for local projects young people want to do. Jenni says working on the streets with young people and local authorities has opened her eyes and given her confidence. She tells us how excited she is to be nominated for the Young Person’s Birmingham’s Local Hearts Award, in the young people category.
Involve is Northfield’s Young Peoples Forum – it was set up in 2005 for 12-19-year-olds to meet monthly.
Involve are given money by local government, which they can then distribute to young people to help them run various activities or projects which they would not otherwise have been able to do. Through this they help young people develop a number of skills such as organisation, teamwork and communication skills. INVOLVE believe they are giving a voice to young people – to get their opinions across to people with power in Northfield and to further that they recently launched their own website: www.involvenorthfield.com.
In the last three years the group have distributed £75,000 of community chest money and £20,000 of youth opportunity fund to individual young people and groups and projects. They recently started their own radio show and videocasting channel – getting young people to comment and debate on prominent issues such as abuse in a relationship. This podcast was recorded in October 2009, just after they had been shortlisted for Local Hearts Award. It has Nick Booth talking to Karen Cheney, Luke Bowles, Sophie Lynch, Jo – spoz – Esposito and Lauren Synott.
Shirley Malone, Gemma O'Neill and Aimee Coakley of the Hawkesley Young Volunteers in Kings Norton - Birmingham.
Aimee Coakley first came across the Hawksley “young vols” as a small child. She watched them working in her neighbourhood in Kings Norton in Birmingham and wanted to be one.
Thanks to that experience she has traveled as far afield as France and India, cleaned streets, helped people keep their gardens tidy and supporting friends and neighbours. Now she has a job because of her volunteer experience. Hers is just one of dozens of stories which explain why the Hawksley Young Volunteers were shortlisted for a Local Hearts Awards in October 2009. For more, listen to the podcast below.
Nicole White and Rourke Holmes of Erdington Constituency Children's Forum
Nicole White and Rourke Holmes have been training adults. They volunteer with different organisations in the Erdington Constituency of the City of Birmingham to help they appreciate how young people view the world.
The aim is very simple, to improve the relationship between government services and the young people who use them in Erdington.
The Forum began in 2005 when the Erdington Constituency asked a group of young people to set up a consultation in the form of a questionnaire which asked about issues which affect them and their peers. One of the questions was, “Who would you prefer to ask you questions – children, or adults” – and all the children said adults. But it became clear adults lacked knowledge and how to engage with kids in the decision making process.
So the Children’s Forum made a training package for the adults looking at the benefits and barriers of involving children. The Children’s forum then tracked the progress made following the training every six months. They also ran a second training session. Over four years ECCF have reached over 258 adults and 486 children. This podcast, with Tom Sandars, was recorded just before the Local Hearts Awards October 2009 – where the group was shortlisted for the award for Young People’s Group.
