Preparing for the World Conference on Youth

In about a week from today (I'm still not quite sure when I'll depart as I haven't seen any tickets or itinerary...) I will be setting off for Sri Lanka, where I will be facilitating one of the Gender Equality round tables at the World Conference on Youth. Ahead of the event I will be taking over the @gguidinganglia twitter account for a chat about my role and WAGGGS priorities on Thursday evening. I will be online from 7-8pm BST to answer any questions about what I am doing and how you can get involved in advocacy through Guiding and Girl Scouts. Tweet any questions you might have to @Pippab3 or @gguidinganglia in the meantime and I will answer them on Thursday.

Inputs for suggested amendments to the zero draft or the outcome document had to be in by Friday and the youth task force is now looking at these ahead of the start of negotiations with governments during the conference. My role at the conference, facilitating a round table, will feed into an appendix to the outcome document highlighting the discussions had. I'll also be speaking in one of the plenaries about Gender Equality. There is also already a zero draft of is document on the WCY2014 website, as well as a series of issue briefs giving a background to each of the thematic areas we will be talking about.

I will also be doing another chat on the 14th May to fill you in on what happened at the conference and more ways for you to get involved! 

Let the youth speak for themselves!

Back in 2009, I was involved in a working group on youth participation for Girlguiding. We were looking at how we could encourage and enable youth participation in all areas of the organisation - allowing girls and young women to ultimately be the ones influencing the decisions about, what is essentially, their organisation. The strategy that came out as a result has created a number of resources and programmes and changes of methodology since. Despite this, I still often see other volunteers who, it seems to me, don't believe that girls and young women can speak for themselves. 

One of the many times I've heard, my role model, Leymah Gbowee speak, I remember she said "in order to empower others, you have to give up a little of your own power". In my own little analogy, you won't learn to drive the car if you stay in the passenger seat, yes you might get a pretty good idea of what the press and what to turn, but you won't be able to do it by yourself until you've had a go being in control. Most people do this is a car with an instructor so that if something gets out of hand they can offer guidance and ultimately step in to stop a catastrophe. And that's how we need to teach leadership and decision making - key skills to use in adult life - by giving young people the opportunity to do that in a safe space. 

The most recent incident that has vexed me is one on the Girlguiding Facebook page. An opportunity to join a panel called 'team digital' was posted last week - this is intended as a focus group type panel to understand how young women use digital technologies and how we can build Girlguidings digital strategy to best support them. The comments feed was awash with cries along the lines of 'why is this only for 16-25 year olds?' And 'are you saying I'm of no use to girlguiding after the age of 26!'. 

Firstly people, stop getting your knickers in a twist. Nobody said your opinions aren't useful and valid. That's why there's a separate digital champions programme that anybody can sign up to! Secondly, it's a programme to find out the behaviours and views of young members and, if you missed that memo, girlguiding defines a young member as any girl or woman up to their 26th birthday. There is no global accepted definition of youth (don't get me started on that one) yes in some quarters it's 30, someone told me it should be 19 and another suggested it went up to 35! The end result of the panel is to find out how young women use digital technology, so the simplest approach to me seems to be to ask the wealth of confident and articulate young women already involved in girlguiding!

The youngest age will be 16 as it's easier to organise overnight unchaperoned meetings with people over this age, but I have no doubt Girlguiding will be involving other young members and adult volunteers in other ways during the process. You may be a youth worker in your day job, but that doesn't make you a young person. Empower young women with the skills to think strategically, make decisions, and utilise digital technologies for positive ends by letting them take on this opportunity.

I know you may think my selfish or hypocritical as I am still 'young', but I know one day the programmes won't be for me any more just like I stopped taking part in the Brownie programme when I was 10. There are plenty of other working groups and volunteer roles in Girlguiding where you can be supported to develop the same skills as an adult volunteer - for one I will welcome you onto our county marketing and communications team to help me manage our website and social media if you would like - I'm happy to have more help! 

This reminds me of the situation I have seen time and again in discussions about youth at the UN. Politicians and policy makers speak on behalf of young people, but when young people do finally get the floor, they often have the clearest, most honest, and most powerful things to say. This is why I am particularly looking forward to the World Conference on Youth that I'll be heading off to in 2 weeks, as for one of the first times every, youth from every country in the world will be working with governments to create an outcome document that truly reflects the future young people want. I am excited to be facilitating these discussions and I hope I will be able to enable a few young people to get their voices and experiences heard along the way. 

It can and should happen at every scale so, from today, let's make a concerted effort to let the youth speak for themselves! 

Girls With Attitude

A few weekends ago, I headed up to Lincolnshire to lead a training session for volunteers from Girlguiding Lincolnshire South at their county training day. I started a very convoluted journey towards becoming a qualified trainer in Girlguiding a few years ago now and due to some paperwork errors along the way I've done more 'unofficial' training than official steps towards becoming a recognised trainer in the meantime. A new, more streamlined system came into play this January, and so this recent session was my first observed practise towards getting the qualification.

Girls With Attitude

 

The session I lead was entitled 'Girls With Attitude' and the aim was to enable volunteer leaders to use existing Girlguiding resources to address some of the issues that are encapsulated in the 'Girls Attitudes Survey'. This survey is an annual piece of research that looks at the contemporary views of girls and young women (not necessarily members of Girlguiding) and for the first time this year, they asked some boys their thoughts too.

I started the session by asking the participants to select one fact from the table that particularly interested them. They were all facts from the 2013 survey results and covered a wide range of issues. During our introductions the facts chosen included:

• One in five girls of primary school age say they have been on a diet. 
• Two in three girls aged 11 to 21 think that there are not enough women in leadership positions in the UK (66%).
• Most girls deal with online abuse on their own and informally rather than reporting it.
• A good job comes top of the list of what girls say they need in life to do well and be happy in the future, and seven out of ten want to combine having children and maintaining a career. 

Some of these are concerning. Some are reassuring. But all of them can be addressed in some way using age appropriate resources produced by Girlguiding. As a large group (I had nearly 30 participants in a school classroom) I set up a selection of activities from different resources and allowed time for everyone to try the activities they wanted before facilitating a discussion on those sensitive issues that may occur when addressing these kind of issues.

The majority say that sex education at school does not focus enough on relationships.

My first activity was suitable for all age groups and taken from "Together We Can" - family constellations. Black card, star stickers and glitter glue was all that was needed and I asked participants to create a constellation that represented their family and their relationships. By using different colours for different types of relationship, it's a thought provoking activity for any age group. My example had myself, my partner and our dog as a triangle in the centre with my parents and sister to one side and my in-laws to the other. The beauty of this activity is that it made people think about the people in their lives and how they relate to one another - how much they disclosed and shared in discussion with the others taking part was purely down to what they felt comfortable sharing. It's the thinking part and the listening that's the most important. I think its a great way to think about the diversity of our relationships, I put my dog on because she literally effects how I live my life on a daily basis and is a great contributor to my happiness. I delineated on how much I communicate with that person rather than prioritising blood relatives over newer acquaintances. The thought process will be age appropriate as younger girls may think more about siblings and parents and the teenagers and adults may think about the intimate relationships they create.

58% of 16-21 year olds say they would like to become a leader in their chosen profession. 

My second activity was a form of silent auction from 'On Your Marks' - to be adapted for the age group and suitable for a not so silent format in a different situation. I listed a number of different ambitions and priorities and with a budget of £100 we each had to say how much we would spend from our budget on achieving each one. Happiness and health came top amongst the group of adults, but it was clear that options like succeeding in exams or performing in a dance show may be higher amongst different age groups. It was anonymous and we compared priorities to see how they might change at different stages of our lives.

71% of 11- to 21-year-olds say they would like to lose weight.

Activities looking at self-esteem and self perception are relatively common within current Girlguiding resources and I found one based on self portraits in resources for the Rainbows (5-7), Brownies (7-10), Guides (10-14) and a new WAGGGS resource called 'Free Being Me'. These varied from asking the youngest girls to use a mirror to draw a self portrait to asking the oldest ones to say why they liked or disliked parts of their anatomy and personality in a self completed quiz sheet. These are the resources that I think need a confident leader to deliver them. When we ask girls to think and talk about the hang ups we have with their body its important to be able to not reflect our own body issues onto the girls and draw a particular focus to the positives to create a generation of body confident young women. That's why I'm particularly happy to see Free Being Me rolled out with trained peer educators and extra training in the use of the resource for leaders.

One in four girls aged 11 to 21 say they would consider cosmetic surgery (27%), rising to almost a third of those aged 16 to 21 (31%).

The resource name for my next activity escapes - it is aimed at Guides (10-14) and I believe it was in partnership with Dove. 'Mould Me Pretty' asked participants to sculpt something beautiful from playdough and then allowed them to make changes to someone elses design. The aim was to discuss the concept of 'beauty in the eye of the beholder' and how some changes can be irreversible.

Due to a lack of women leaders, 54% of girls feel that they have less chance of succeeding themselves.

My last activity was from a new resource aimed at 10-14 year olds - Go For It! Be The Change. This resource was written by two senior section members who went to the Girls World Forum in Chicago in 2012 (the successor to the Young Women's World Forum event I attended in 2010). It aims to increase girls advocacy and leadership skills and increase their interest in all forms of politics. I asked participants to think about powerful women - to make a list of women they thought powerful, to write down the characteristics they thought powerful women had and to use a variety of materials to create a poster displaying their messages about why powerful women are great. The feedback I got was that its difficult to think of that list of women, we all came up with a similar shortlist of powerful females hence the need for the activity in the first place! Others went deep into the terminology and when working with girls there might be more time to really get into the nitty gritty of what we mean by powerful that just wasn't there in a training session that lasted under two hours. However the activity achieved its aim as it helped us think about how you might suceed and achieve ambitions even when the road is currently not well travelled by other women.

My Evaluation

I left the session knowing that I hadn't made the connections between the acitivities and the issues as explicit as I might have liked. But that doesn't mean the session wasn't a success. I believe those volunteers will go back to their groups with new activities and a desire to use some of these existing resources that they might not have considered before. I know that Girlguiding resources are designed to be relevant and useful to girls living in the here and now - some have stayed the same in our 104 year history and others have adapted with the times. That's why I know that whether I conveyed the link or not, these volunteers will be giving girls the life skills for the world they are facing.

That's how Girlguiding changes to world, one girl at a time.

Facilitating the World Conference on Youth

This week I received some very exciting news - in under a month (23 days according to the countdown on the website homepage) I will be travelling to Sri Lanka to act as a facilitator at the World Conference on Youth 2014. This event, running from the 5th - 10th May in Colombo, will be focusing on the role youth can play in, and ensuring youth issues are reflected in, the international development agenda that will come into effect in 2015 after the completion date of the Millennium Development Goals.

I have yet to find out which 'Themes' or 'Foundations' I will be facilitating on, but my preference definitely includes the 'Gender Equality' track. As with most UN events, it is incredibly difficult to go from a blank page to an outcome document in under a week (and nearer to four days!) and so a 'Zero Draft' of the outcome document has already been released for comment. This document has 70 paragraphs based on text and wording previously agreed at other UN events. You can download this document and feedback your own views on it here.

Global Youth Forum, Bali, 2012. I hope the outcomes from Sri Lanka will be as progressive.

The Zero Draft

This morning I sat down with the Zero Draft and started to note what I would like to change to make it more progressive and ambitious. If the outcome document only contains statements that have already been agreed to elsewhere within the UN, we can rightly say this conference will have been a waste of time and a copy/paste exercise. the text at the moment has a few paragraphs that I will whole-heartedly champion (e.g. ending violence against women and girls) however I want to push these even further - lets end all gender based violence including that based on sexual orientation and minority gender identities. What I am hoping for is some progressive new language that would further the rights, inclusion and development of young people beyond what has been agreed to before!

 Regular blog readers may remember my trip to the Global Youth Forum in December 2012 - a youth focused event hosted by the UN Population Fund as part of their ongoing 20 year review of the International Conference on Population and Development. That outcome document, The Bali Youth Declaration contained a lot of progressive language on topics such as SRHR (Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights) and supporting marginalized populations (including minority sexualities and gender identities). However, its downfall is that it was essentially a consultation document going forward - the forum was a lot more youth and a lot less governments, meaning we were making really strong recommendations, but that governments are not obliged to listen to the ones that don't fit with their priorities. The action as a result of that event came from the youth constituencies, those who used it as a document to aid the lobbying in a wide variety of national and international political processes.

The World Conference on Youth 2014 will be attended by just as many young people but, if my understanding is correct, there will also be representives of a large number of governments and UN agencies. The zero draft contains a paragraph calling on the Secretary General to refer to this document in ongoing Post-2015 Agenda negotiations and reports and also for the UN General Assembly (the body which every government is part of) to recognise the outcome document of the conference as a 'critical contribution' to the Post-2015 debate. It is this potential influence and recognition which will make the World Conference on Youth's outcome document more important and influential, but at the same time it's these same factors that may make it more difficult to make it progressive.

The 'I'm thinking how to edit this UN language' face.

My Edits

Having gone through the document this morning I have tried to achieve three things:

• Ensure the needs of those with minority gender identities and diverse sexual orientations are recognised - especially under gender equality paragraphs.
• Strengthen and include more rights based language - especially relating to sexual and reproductive rights. 
• Make it grammatically correct. This may be the pedant in me, but if it doesn't read write then what it legally means is even more up for debate!

I have only made a brief starton improving these areas so far and, whilst I hate to reiterate merely what has come before, I will need to show the precedent for the phrases and insertions I have made before I submit my feedback later this week.

What issues do you want to see included in the outcome document? Let me know and I will try and include them with my feedback.