For those of you who haven’t come across us yet, we are the Emotional Health & Homelessness team within Cardiff Youth Service. Within the last few months you may have received an iCare box from your youth worker or attended one of the Summer events and built one yourself with us. As a reminder, these are self-care boxes based around the 5 senses that can be used as a toolbox to support with your emotional health and wellbeing. You would have also received a self-care journal which includes a number of activities that provide you with skills and strategies around emotional health.
As a team we’re now setting up a pilot group to provide feedback and direction to our work. We’re looking at identifying a consistent group of young people who can have their say and voices heard along with evaluating some of our projects. The initial session will be a FREE pizza night and some ice breakers/activities, where we can also plan for future meetings. (I.e How you would want these to look, content of each session, how often we’d meet up and the kind of things you would want to be included in each session). Other opportunities available to young people would be to get involved in our iCare Programme and other programmes such as Homelessness sessions that we take into schools/centres. There could be further opportunities to be trained up as peer mentors too, which could improve your plans for the future, whichever route you may choose…maybe even youth work?!
To break that down a bit more..
We’ve created a 12 week programme deriving from our iCare boxes that includes both group and 1:1 work. These iCare sessions focus on regulating and understanding emotions, journaling, triggers, grounding techniques etc with a range of activities involved. In terms of the homelessness sessions we’ve then followed a similar structure which ties emotional health in with risk factors of becoming homeless down the line. We aim to raise awareness of early warning signs and hidden homelessness. To help with the structure of these sessions we’ve taken aspects from the State of Mind programme that the organisation Platfform deliver. This programme that they run is open to young people struggling with their mental health and is often run by peer mentors who have been through similar experiences. With this in mind, we’d hope to train up some of you young people within the pilot group who could come into schools with us and provide first hand experience.
We’re looking for a range of ages and backgrounds who are willing to get involved with all or just parts of the above. You’ll be in charge of choosing the direction the group takes and your voices/opinions will be at the forefront of it all. If it’s not for experience then this group will provide an opportunity for you guys to get to know one another and build confidence. For those of you who want to get a feel of Youth Work, this is a great way of seeing what we do on a day to day basis. More importantly, we can work with you to become a Young Leader within the Youth service itself! This would be a volunteer role which would give you a valuable route in to a career as a Youth Worker!
Please get in touch with @cyswellbeing on Facebook or Instagram if you’re interested. Otherwise have a chat with your Youth Worker who can contact us to come in for a chat if you’d prefer. We’ll work around you 😊
We look forward to meeting some of you soon!
Thanks,
Simon, Naidyne & Elinor
Tags: Mindfullness, Self-care, Activities