The Barnsley Steering Group was set up by its six founding members in December 2009. It was made up of young people who had participated in the YSDF programmes between October and December that year. Two groups of young people came together from four areas of Barnsley and intended to meet with staff members on regular occasions to discuss the project. The Steering group now meets two to three times each quarter with youth workers.
2009
The Steering Group take part in creative team building activities to help everyone to work together as a group. Initial work involved the group evaluating the activities they had participated in with The Youth Association. These evaluations helped young people to develop a short presentation about their experiences with the detached teams and their programmes. They presented this to The Youth Association Board of Trustees and other Steering Groups. The presentations were followed by some voice and influence work with the Board of Trustees. Amongst other themes, the group shared their views on how they could get involved with a young people’s advisory panel to shadow the Board.
2010
By March 2010 one more young person had joined the group, taking the total number of young people involved to seven. During this session, the group examined the structure of The Youth Association and looked at what role the Steering Group had to play. The group then shared their views about the idea of a Youth Association membership scheme and also where they thought detached teams should be working and with whom. The members of the Steering Group also gave their ideas on what these should be and which of these are the most important.
Go Karting
As a team-building activity, the Steering Group took part in a trip to ‘Avago Karting’ in Swinton. This was in March 2010. The young people really enjoyed the go-karting and Lewis came out on top that day. They had a 50-lap endurance race and then helped to finish off the street-based film that the detached team was producing.
The steering group have plans to continue with further work this year
