Oxfam Youth Ambassadors

Oxfam Youth Ambassadors

Description

The Youth Ambassadors programme uses a participatory framework to develop the active global citizenship skills of young people aged 11-18. Groups of young people are supported by teachers or other responsible adults and meet voluntarily outside the hours of the school curriculum. Participants develop the skills of leadership, active participation and voice through taking part in three projects lasting approximately 2-3 months each during the year. A ‘Calendar of Action’ provides resources and regular activities for groups to follow, and, in addition, groups are encouraged to develop their own activities in line with Oxfam’s broader values and issues. At the end of a year participants provide a brief portfolio describing their activities and are awarded the Oxfam Youth Ambassadors badge and certificate.

Principles

1. Participation is voluntary: groups meet outside formal curriculum time and participate as young citizens rather than school students.

2. Participants have choice: groups have choice about which activities they follow. A ‘calendar of action’ provides groups with a selection of suggested projects. Groups are encouraged to choose from these projects, adapt these projects or develop their own projects.

3. Activities follow a Learn – Think – Act pedagogy: The first activity in each calendar of action resource asks groups to learn about an issue through teaching the topic to each other or others. Learning is followed by thinking in the shape of planning which is then followed by an appropriate social action.

4. Participation in groups is flexible and inclusive: The Youth Ambassadors badge recognises participation and commitment, not reaching a certain level of ability. Young people set their own targets and decide what to record in their portfolios. The project is therefore inclusive for young people of different abilities. Participants complete a new badge each year and this enables progression as young people set themselves more challenging targets year on year. Participation is flexible. There is no specified time commitment or time of the year when activities should take place. The only expectation is that obtaining the Youth Ambassadors Badge will require young people to complete three projects during the course of approximately one year.

5. The Youth Ambassador Activities build Knowledge, Understanding, Values, Attitudes and Skills (KUVAS)[1]The learning activities deepen knowledge and understanding, topic content and the participatory nature of the groups strengthens values and attitudes and the citizenship activities build skills for active citizenship.

6. Hart’s Ladder of Young People’s Participation[2]provides guidance for ensuring that the participation promoted by group activities is not manipulative, decorative or tokenised. However achieving the higher levels of Hart’s typology requires specialist skills that the teacher or facilitator may or may not possess. Building the capacity of the teacher or responsible adult is therefore important.

The Process

1. Registration. A teacher or responsible adult registers a group with Oxfam and provides basic contact details. Primary contact is held with this responsible adult and direct contact with children is kept to an absolute minimum.

Groups are sent sufficient copies of the Get Started and Change the World guides[3] to assist with planning group meetings and provide support with active global citizenship skills. Teachers and responsible adults are sent a copy of the Making A Difference guide.

2. Youth Ambassadors begin their activities. The Get Started guide – see - provides guidance on how young people can effectively organise group meetings with appropriate support from the responsible adult. Groups usually have between 10 and 20 members, and may be comprised of young people of the same age or different ages. Groups usually meet weekly, either after school finishes or during the school lunch hour.

3. The Calendar of Action. Oxfam posts two Calendar of Action resources online each term, giving a total of six resources during the year. The resources are written for the 11-14 age group although they can be easily adapted to suit older or younger children.

Each resource comprises

• A Teacher’s Guide: provides a brief background to the topic with suggestions for curriculum making and further reading.
• A PowerPoint Presentation: introduces the topic in no more than 10 slides. The text is designed to be easily understood and presented to others by young people or to be conveniently adapted for peer teaching.
• A Workshop Activity: deepens participants’ knowledge of the topic through an active learning workshop. The workshop may be delivered within the group or delivered by the group to groups of other young people.
• An Action Guide: suggests opportunities for further planning and taking action on the topic. The Action Guide begins with a brief introduction to the topic followed by a choice of 3 sorts of action, each of which shows a greater level of action and impact.

For the purpose of SFYOUTH these actions will follow these stages:

1. Inform:Helping other people to understand the issue, for example through teaching other young people about what they have learnt. This can be small in scale.
2. Broadcast: Raising awareness in wider numbers of people – e.g. in the local community. This can be wider in scale.
3. Influence: Identifying a decision maker who can affect the issue and directing an action towards them, e.g. a politician or business leader. This can take the most planning.

• Supplementary materials: used to support the workshop, eg: maps, photographs, flash cards etc.

The format of each resource is standardised. However groups are encouraged to adapt the resources to make them fit for purpose or to plan their own independent activities. Many of the more experienced and confident groups become skilled at planning independently. This is a desirable skill development for groups as they build their knowledge and experience.

4. The Youth Ambassadors Badge. The Oxfam Youth Ambassadors badge is designed to reward participation and commitment. It does not have pre-set standards. Therefore the criteria for being awarded the badge are flexible and at the discretion of the teacher or responsible adult to decide if young people have shown them.

To be awarded the badge young people are asked to provide evidence of the following three skills in a portfolio of evidence.

• Leading others
• Participating Actively
• Having a Voice

These skills may be interpreted flexibly. However some examples are listed below

Participants provide evidence of how they have demonstrated each skill in a separate project. This means they need to have 3 projects listed in the portfolio, one for each skill. Of course, the three skills are not separate, sothey all overlap. However for the purposes of writing the Youth Ambassador Badge portfolio, participants are required to only record participation against the selected skill for that project.Skills may be recorded in any order and in relation to any activity done by the youth ambassadors, and the evidence can vary in length for different projects and skills.

At the end of each activity the group sends their portfolio to Oxfam. The portfolio includes;

• A brief overall description of the project, the group’s activities, the number of group participants and the number of young people engaged along with the names and roles of decision makers influenced (eg: MPs, journalists etc). This may include photographs, letters and other appropriate documentary evidence.
• A brief statement summarising the contribution of each young person and the skill selected for the activity. This may include photographs, letters and other appropriate documentary evidence.

Participants may write their own statements but they should be signed off by the teacher or responsible adult. Being sent from the teacher’s email account would be proof of this.

Challenges

1. The role of the teacher or responsible adult. Recent experience teaches us that the role of the teacher or responsible adult is critical for the group’s success. The skills required to do this are not automatically possessed by all teachers. The group leader is required to support and facilitate the group while encouraging participation, leadership and ownership of projects by group members. Support should not be too directive, or too open. Experience also shows that even groups of older young people rarely possess the ability to organise themselves effectively without some adult support at the beginning. Considering in greater detail how teachers are best supported and developed in this role is a work in progress and goes beyond the teacher as a contact point and organiser of room bookings and other basic logistics.

2. Face-to-face contact with groups. Oxfam’s initial Youth Ambassadors model assumed regular face-to-face contact with Oxfam staff and volunteers. However this to scale the model up Oxfam re-launched the programme with only remote support offered through the website. The current programme is intended to run with minimum or no face-to-face contact with Oxfam. However this approach presents its own challenges. It assumes the teacher and young people regularly use the resources on the website and provide the required feedback in a timely manner.

Case study

The Sir John Lawes School Youth Ambassadors Group has 10 committed members ranging in age from 12 to 18 and several affiliated members. The school possesses a strong ethos of student leadership and participation, and the Oxfam group is one of several initiatives to enjoy a high profile and level of support within the school.

In the Spring and early Summer of 2013 the group adapted the IF coalition’s ‘Paper Plates’ action drawing attention to the number of hungry people in the world during the run up to the G20 Summit in Northern Ireland.

Using Oxfam’s resources the group designed their own assembly and lesson plan about the world’s broken food system. Group members delivered the assembly and followed up with lessons to 350 students and asked participants to write a message to the Prime Minister on paper plates.

200 students showed their support by designing paper plate messages during the lesson. This activity was voluntary and presented as a political action. The paper plate messages were then displayed in the school canteen for the entire school community to read. This further deepened the school community’s awareness and understanding of global hunger.

Members of the group then arranged a meeting with their MP during his scheduled constituency surgery, presented him with the paper plates and asked him to request that the Prime Minister placed world hunger at the top of the G20 agenda. Other students wrote a press release for the project and it was featured in the local weekly newspaper along with the school’s own media (website, newsletter etc).

Finally 2 members of the group were invited by the IF coalition to meet the Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street when 30,000 paper plates designed by children from around the country were handed in.

[1]See pgs 4-7

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