International Youth Day - 12th August

I was asked by the Cabinet office last week if we could provide examples of young people having a positive impact on their communities and working hard to get on so they can be celebrated as part of international youth day this week.

Whilst I know that there are lots of fabulous young people in Surrey doing this stuff, I was concerned about whether the right people would be around in Youth Organisations in mid-August to answer the call. However, many of you are hard at work at your desks (or checking your emails on holiday – naughty!) and our members have done us proud… there have been a flurry of responses. Just a few:

• Skillway nominated Josh Taylor – check out his website 
• Eikon’s (@eikoncharity) Youth Development Board have been working hard feeding back to trustees and organising an awards evening.
• Through YMCA East Surrey’s extensive volunteer and employability programme, called ‘Get Involved’, young people have been gaining work experience and qualifications with a view to finding future employment. Well done especially to the volunteers of the month – Frankie, Abbi and Sam.
• Epsom Phab we have a fantastic group of young volunteers who dedicate hours of their time to ensuring a wide range of activities are provided for the children with and without disabilities  at our club.

Do encourage any young people you are working with to tweet on the day (August 12) using the #aimhigh or #YouthDay.

Also, do use this to publicise opportunities that you have for young people.

Just to give you some ideas about what you might like to tweet about:

• Joe Bloggs from Surrey started her own social enterprise at 20. Could you do the same? #AimHigh (including a picture with with hashtag)
• Under 25 and have a business idea? Here's how to start (include link and hashtag)
• Girlguiding gave me the opportunity to make a real difference to my local community #AimHigh
• Could you be a volunteer and make a difference? Include hashtag and weblink

I’m off on holiday for the next two weeks, so there’ll be a two week gap in my blog as I am away with hubby and kids to cycle in South Wales for a week after which I will hopefully be relaxed enough to be able to sit still on a beach in Cornwall for a week. See you in September.

Forgetting the past

Sometimes it's good to remember and learn from the past (as individuals and nations). However, who out of us doesn't have something they would rather forget? Furthermore, who out of us doesn't have something we would rather the world couldn't find out about for the next ten, twenty, fifty years... that photo of me with a perm that I thought was so cool in the eighties...

Unfortunately the way that it has become the social norm for young people to live their lives online these days, their youthful indiscretions will often be exhibited or talked about online for all to see.

An interesting campaign called iRights has been launched to allow children to delete their online past.

I am not sure how this would work in practice, but it's certainly an interesting idea. I am wondering whether there are any downsides (other than the logistics of achieving this), I can't immediately think of them. I would be interested to hear some experts discuss this!

Communilab - an idea whose time has come

I went to a meeting with David Hodge, the leader of Surrey CC, and a number of charity CEOs last week. These are regular meetings - about three times a year - to inform us about short and long-term financial planning and how it might affect the charity sector. The good news is that there have not so far been in the in year cuts from central government for 2015-6 that were once feared. The council will know more about the 2016 funding after 25th November. It is baffling to me how national finances are run. Councils, who need for efficiency reasons to give out contracts lasting, say, 5 years, do not know their next year's finances until a few months beforehand.  

Surrey CCs overall income is remaining roughly flat over a number of years (increasing council tax receipts but decreasing monies from central government). However, the outgoings are increasing massively for reasons out of Surrey's control. Surrey has the largest population of 100 year olds in the country! Of course, with a particularly large elderly population comes the associated costs of care for conditions such as dementia. Furthermore, more babies with serious health conditions are surviving through to adulthood, also with associated care costs.  Finally, lots of families with young children move into the county from London.

So, the council's finances are going to continue to be squeezed. This backs up a quote from NESTA:

•       “We face seemingly intractable long-term economic and social challenges … radical innovation is needed in public services to respond effectively to these challenges.

•       Radical new approaches require radical new actors. We need to combine the ingenuity and initiative of a diverse group of innovators – from the public sector, private companies and third sector, alongside users and communities – to find new solutions to pressing economic and social problems.”

                                                      Michael Harris and David Albury.

                                                      The innovation imperative." NESTA, London (2009)

As many of you know, our Communilab community is bringing together just such a diverse group of innovators - public sector, private companies, third sector, users and communities AND also we plan to involve schools/universities.  Communilab aims to create opportunities and solve problems for young people in Surrey. As budgets get squeezed further, we believe the potential benefits from Communilab will be huge. Already we are getting some great examples of collaboration - click here for more information on Youth Work on the Pitch, our football collaboration between Leatherhead Youth Project, Lifetrain, Surrey FA, Active Surrey, Kings College and others. Click here to see the original collaboration conversation that led to this work.

What is good mental health?

Apologies for the lack of blog for a few weeks. A family bereavement followed by a couple of weeks with a full diary playing catch up and my blog got neglected.

A theme that comes up time and again in my work is young people’s mental health in Surrey and it seems particularly appropriate to think about this now. I have had discussions with various people and no one has come up with a definition of what good mental health looks like. We have an idea of measures about good physical health – body mass index, heart rates, cholesterol – and what we need to do to achieve this – exercise, 5 a day, etc.

In other areas of public activities there is a clear focus on the positive – a sense of safety rather than a fear of crime. We have the much more proactively named “Supporting Families” work rather than the “Troubled Families” programme.

So, with respect to mental health, I believe it is important to know what we are aiming for. What does good mental health look like? And what can we do to get there?

So far, I have not managed to find an official definition of what good mental health is. Can anyone provide me with one?

In the meantime, we do have some excellent feedback from the CAMHS Rights and Participation team who asked young people what they thought it meant to be emotionally healthy.

After a discussion here is a list of what they believed could define good emotional health:
- Good independent coping mechanisms
- Balanced range of emotions
- Being able to stay positive even when times are tough.
- Having the ability to learn from experiences and move forward positively.
- Having a “Thirst for life”  (Looking forward to the future positively).
- Accepting there are bad days as well as good days.
- Healthy understanding of your own thoughts, feelings and emotions.
- Knowing your possibilities and being realistic.
- Being able to make goals, and having hopes and dreams.
- Feeling motivated.
- Not being hard on yourself.
- Being able to feel comfortable in "your own shell"

A young person also wrote a piece of text to describe what good emotional well being looks like:

Good emotional health is having good independent coping mechanisms to be able to successfully deal with any situation that might arise in daily life. Good emotional health is to have a balanced range of emotions, and to be able to express them all healthily, whilst also learning from all experiences and move forward from them positively. Good emotional health is staying positive even when times are tough, and being aware that everyone has bad days from time to time.

Please do let me know if you have seen an official definition of what good mental health looks like.

The Football World Cup

...no, I'm not going to launch into a discussion about bribes ...and the whole FIFA scandal...don't get me started on that one...

The Football World Cup is going on right now. Did you know? It's in Canada. England are through to the last sixteen and are playing Norway at 9pm tonight (22nd June). You can watch it on BBC3. In case you have no idea what I am going on about, it's the Women's World Cup. I'm very glad that England's matches are being shown on mainstream TV, a big improvement over a few years ago.

So, why do I think it relevant to mention this in a blog about young people? The benefits of sport on mental health, physical health, resilience, etc, etc, are too well documented for me to go into here. It still goes to show the difference in role models offered up by society to young women  and young men.  So, it's very important that young woman are exposed to the right role models to consider that sport is for "people like them".

I hope that you will be encouraging the young people, especially young women, in your life to watch the football and be inspired by it.

Equality and inequality

A week of sharp contrasts. Last Thursday I went to a highly informative and thought provoking seminar on child poverty organised by Surrey County Council and The Walton Charity. The two speakers were Professor Tess Ridge from the University of Bath and Helen Caldwell, the Strategic Development office from North Somerset Council, who between them have extensive experience of understanding and overcoming child poverty.

Some of the points that stood out for me:

- Living in poverty touches so many aspects of a child's life experience as they grow up.

- Children as young as six living in poverty will try to protect their parents by not bringing notes home from school that ask for money for, say, school trips.

- Low income homes are often doubly hit because the work that they do get is highly erratic, unstable and hence their already low incomes vary from one week to the next, creating a lot of uncertainty for the child.

- Participation of poor children in after school informal learning is key to giving them better life chances.

At the other end of the financial spectrum, on Monday I was highly privileged to be invited to attend the celebrations of the Magna Carta at Runnymede in the presence of the Queen, Prince Philip, Princess Anne, Duke of Cambridge, David Cameron, the Attorney General of the United States, and MPs. It was a lovely event with lots of young people from schools around Surrey participating in musical and ceremonial activities. It was a great opportunity to reflect on how most of us are lucky to live in one of the safest and most affluent countries in the world. Reflecting on the actions of those barons 800 years ago, I particularly liked the closing words by David Cameron: "What we do today will shape the world for many, many years to come."

What we need to be doing today is working together to ensure that young people growing up in poverty here in Surrey (yes, there 23,000 of them in Surrey) have the same opportunities and life chances as the rest of us.

Good surprises and impressive young people

No blog last week – I was on holiday with my family in the Lake District. My children frequently surprise me. Mostly with good things, sometimes not so good. Last week in the very good category, our four year old walked and scrambled up Blencathra,  the 16^th tallest mountain in England. We expected lots of complaints, but got none, she was enthusiastic all the way. Our ten year old did complain, but only that we weren’t going fast enough nor letting him go on some of the interesting (i.e. dangerous) routes. I’m sure that I would have given my parents a lot more grief about being asked to walk up a mountain at that age.

Enough about my own kids, onto other young people who also impressed me. Just before I went on leave, I visited the Surrey Heath Youth Forum and saw for myself why they won the Group Volunteering Superstar at the Surrey Young Superstars awards. What a fantastic group of young people. I really enjoyed hearing their ideas and enthusiasm for how they can make a difference. They are currently running an anti-bullying campaign and are starting to plan some work on substance abuse. I look forward to hearing how they get on. You may have heard the term “Youth Social Action” from myself or others – this was definitely it. For groups wanting to run Youth Social Action, I can highly recommend learning from this group.