4 Years with YMCA Bimingham

I realised recently that I celebrated my 4 year anniversary with YMCA Birmingham. I’ve put together a few of my favourite moments so far in my journey. Thanks to all that have supported YMCA Birmingham and me so far! 

1. United Nations Economic Social Forum – Representing World/YMCA England & Wales as a Youth Ambassador at a United Nations Social Economic youth forum in New York. The forum provided a platform for youth to engage in a dialogue with Member States and to discuss the policy frameworks and promote innovative, approaches and initiatives for advancing youth development.
2. Parliament Visit/General Election Hustings - Organising a visit for young people to visit Parliament to speak about issues affecting them, helping shape a youth manifesto for the local area and arranging Hustings events which all promoted further opportunity for young people to have a voice in political matters.
3. Take-away Chefs - The project – Take Away Chefs – was a resident led programme which produced a booklet with healthy and easy-to-follow recipes, alongside a competition for two local schools to provide the artwork for the booklet. The project was highly commended from both the Money for Life Challenge and local MP Jack Dromey.
4. London Marathon - I have also ran London Marathon twice for YMCA Birmingham& England, that’s a bloody hard run but what an unbelievable feeling that you have conquered 26.2 miles and raised vital funds for vulnerable young people!
5. Unify - I was fortunate enough to be selected to represent YMCA Birmingham at the first Youth Unify conference in Lublin, Poland, I took a young person and lead my own small group of young people from all around Europe and it my role to facilitate time to consider and reflect upon YMCA’s Christian mission.
6.  Youth Matters Award - I was lucky enough to be put forward by the management team at YMCA Birmingham for the YMCA Matters Award. It was just an honour to be nominated, let alone win it. From winning the award I was promoted to the role Training and Employability officer in our brilliant Training team within our Social Enterprise
7.  Y-Care International, JAI Olive Picking Programme - I attended & took two young people from YMCA Birmingham to a 10 day project supporting Palestinian families in the villages of Wad Foukin, Beit Sahour, Teqou', Walaja and Beit Jala within the Bethlehem area, and tour within the Jerusalem area. This year, the program came under conditions of escalating settler attacks and Israeli army measures, which caused an increase in riots and popular resistance movements by Palestinian youth in various cities and villages throughout Palestine.
8.  Change Agents – The YMCA Change Agent programme is a World YMCA global leadership development programme to empower young leaders as change makers in their own communities, I’ve so far been on training programmes in France and Portugal. As part of the programme we build a project in our local community to support young people and help facilitate YMCA’s World Conference in Thailand.
9. Opening of the Chris Bryant Centre - The training team was fortunate enough to meet Princess Anne at the opening of the Chris Bryant Centre in Erdington. Princess Anne participated in a employability workshop and was great fun!
10. Princess Fiona - Many of my colleagues and friends from the gym will remmeber when I dressed as Princess Fiona to do a zumba class to raise money for residents at the Orchard, thanks Eileen and Emma for the makeup and dress!

It's not every day that you receive an email selecting you to represent YMCA at the UN

Blog written by Charlie Smith, Youth Ambassador from YMCA Norfolk, who represented YMCA England & Wales as part of World YMCA's delegation at the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) Youth Forum, in New York, on Tuesday 29 and Wednesday 30 January.

It is not every day that you receive an email, stating that you have been selected to represent not only your local and national YMCA, but the World YMCA at the United Nations. Yup, the UNITED NATIONS. This is not small stuff but the big time. My immediate reaction was to pinch myself just to make sure that I was in fact awake and this was really happening.

After a long day of travelling, we were there! Checked in our little pod which would be home for the next few nights. Walking through the streets of New York to one of the many YMCA buildings they have providing affordable use of gyms, was just incredible. I am a short being but I felt so tiny walking in between buildings that had floor after floor! YMCA's Westside Building was equally as incredible. For a city with such modern construct to have this little gem of history was amazing.

Tuesday morning, the UN visit has arrived. And it was as incredible as I had imagined. The weather was questionable with snow and high winds, but that made for a wonderful backdrop to the views around the grounds of the UN. I had the great privilege to sit amongst the delegates from across the world, one of the best seats in the house. This just added to the experience.

It was great to hear in the opening section of the United Nations ECOSOC Youth Forum how the youth voice had a great role to play and that young people are the ‘innovators’, that we should allow all young people to ‘make noise’ at all times by removing those gatekeepers that they often come across.

Round table speakers gave me a great insight into what was achieved from so many across the world in various ways from fighting radical elements from the United Arab Emirates to educating young people in agricultural colleges providing them with a computer each in Cameroon.

To be perfectly honest, my knowledge of the ECOSOC Youth Forum was limited but this whole experience has opened my eyes to the vast knowledge and experience that could be utilised from various countries and that we should in fact share information rather than boast about ‘what we are doing’. It was an opportunity to raise concerns about different areas of work but to also provide advice on how to engage with young people who may be hardest to reach. 

This was evident in the breakout session I attended on the first day. I was able to meet and chat with various individuals about using science, technology and innovation to build engagement, to develop skills in this area but also most importantly build resilience and to help those that may have faced tragedy of some sort. As part of the group speaking mainly about resilience we spoke about the importance of having concrete foundations in place to then assist young people further with their development and how science and technology could assist with this. Conversations were based on improving ICT skills with young people and wider access to internet especially when a crisis had occurred.

We then had to report back our discussion to the rest of the breakout group. Without even thinking about it I placed my hand in the air to volunteer myself as tribute (Hunger Games reference for you there). So I had just said that I would speak in front of many on the main points we had made for future work- yeah I do not know why either. But I did it! I got up and spoke about our three main points to consider:

1. Building Science, Technology and Innovation infrastructure and improving literacy through local needs assessments as each country is different and requires different areas of technology.
2. Training of trainers to encourage community based interventions to identify specific skills and interests such as volunteer innovation hubs
3. Building data from all avenues in both public and private partnerships but from also those in the community to leverage big data. Also to ensure that the need of this data and the results are communicated those it would have a large effect on.

So I did it. I spoke at the United Nations, representing World YMCA! To say my mum was proud is an understatement.

Wednesday, Day two. This was as good as the first. Learning so much more than I could ever do by reading through information. I was able to get a real feel for what delegates wanted to express from their countries and organisations.

The breakout session around what is happening in Europe, North America and other states was as equally as interesting as the breakout session the day previously. We spoke about the European Youth Forum and shared vast knowledge of various government policies and how to engage young people further in the importance of their government and policies.

Having YMCA at the United Nations for the ECOSOC Youth Forum was really valuable. Many of the comments on how to engage young people and how to build and develop their resilience was something we were already aware of across the different YMCAs in attendance, or we were already working on this. We were then able to share across the delegates our own insight to this and often some of our suggestions had not even been thought of prior to the youth forum. We were able to give a youth voice at a global youth event which was invaluable.

This whole experience has opened my eyes to a larger picture and the importance of ALL YMCAs in the development of our young people as rightly said by one of the delegates ‘young people bring solutions rather than complaints’.