Recently, Bebo hosted an all-day event for members of the No to Knives and Crime Coalition, as well as others working in the sector of positive youth engagement in London and beyond. I want to share my slides and notes here for those who attended as well as for all those out there who didn’t 🙂
My presentation concentrated on a few case studies where certain technologies were the appropriate tools for engagement and aided work to connect, empower, and educate youth communities.
There are really just so many great examples for this topic. If you are looking for more examples about social media and communications technologies applied to youth empowerment, here are some additional links/groups to check out:
- http://bom411.com (social media used as outreach about teen dating violence)
- “huge forum success via virtual worlds (e.g. Habbo’s InfoBus re: curbing violence against gay teens; developing understanding via the Matthew Shepard Foundation visiting ‘in-world’ or the War Child Int’l foundation partnership to focus in-world on kids impacted by violence in Afghanistan, Iraq, Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda etc. (they hosted a cool “virtual Global Peace” gathering inside their world to coincide w/last fall’s UN discussion of same: http://tinyurl.com/ngzfxm)” – from Amy at Shaping Youth
- http://www.myspace.com/invisiblechildren
- http://www.myspace.com/oxjam
- http://geturvoiceheard.co.uk
- http://engage.wesharestuff.org/
- www.publicmattersgroup.com/about.htm
- www.marketmakeovers.org
- www.vimeo.com/publicmatters
- headspace: The National Youth Mental Health Foundation in Australia
After the case studies, I focused in on two aspects of the strategy building that are most important:
The Audience – if you do your research (even if you are “sure” you already know), you can identify your audience, those you already talk to and those you don’t. You can figure out how best to communicate, and how (both the medium and the words). You can see more about this in the slides above.
The Goals – yes, we all want to, in this case, fight knife crime; but that’s not our goal. Take the time to identify your goals focused on living in and inviting youth to co-create a community without knife crime. There is more about goals in the slides above.
If you would like to view the presentation above with the speaker notes included, click here.
What do you think? Has your organization tackled issues in the youth community and used new technologies to support your work? Share your story – we’d love to hear it!
Interesting article and presentation.
Have you checked out vinspired’s Voicebox project?
http://www.vinspired.com/voicebox
It’s still in its early stages but Sidekick Studios and vinspired are working to put young people at the centre of the conversation.
After consulting young people to develop the themes for investigation we’re using online opinion polls and data visualisation to engage as many people as possible. The aim of this open research project is to get people involved in the debate by stating their opinions and instantly seeing where they sit with the average results. The more people that do the surveys, the more chance we have of getting a fair understanding of young people’s views.
We shall be partnering with Demos to engage key policy makers with the findings and the methodology as a new example for social engagement.