Meeting Outline
Weeks 1 - 3
Community Building / Final Recruitment
Spending time connecting the youth participants, facilitators and volunteers. Each week will provide for the group to connect, build relationships and understanding of each other and their backgrounds and experiences. Taking the time to build these relationships will help ensure that when the learning and inevitable sharing of personal experiences occurs, the group has developed trust, gained a solid understanding of the Four Pillars, and can share honestly, opening and freely.
As young people participate and have fun while meeting they are likely to encourage their own social network to join and get involved. Using social media promote the meetings - and use photo's, quotes and ideas from youth to share with others what is happening at the weekly meetings. Maybe one of the activities includes the group creation of a Facebook page or Twitter account.
Weeks 4 - 12
Studying the Issue
In each of these weeks the youth will begin to learn more about what the issue really is about. The YDM model supports the idea that we know what we know in life three ways:
- Our own lived experiences, ideas and feelings
- The experiences of our friends and family - what we have ‘heard'
- The existing knowledge or research about a topic
In these eight weeks you will walk the team of youth through this process. This can include having sharing circles or other activities to help youth share their stories (if they choose) and experiences; conducting research of their own (see below), and by looking at what knowledge is out there.
Our own lived experiences, ideas and feelings
This process can be very challenging and as facilitators you will need to determine if / when your group is prepared to being this part of the studying. It’s important to be aware of where the group is – though one person might be ready to share their story - is the rest of the group ready to listen? It is important to remind youth about confidentiality and what you are able and not able to keep confidential. By incorporating the Four Pillars in the process, creating a safe space and building a strong community it will allow this part of the journey your group is on to be one that is powerful and with as few risks as possible. Be sure to connect with the group and individuals about how they are and when meetings have a lot of personal sharing about violence in young women's lives, it is very important to check the HHFS sheets immediately following a group.
This process might not occur all at once - how, when and where youth share their own experiences will come when they are ready. In some meetings like this, one sharing can lead to a whole group can follow suit. Other times it might take time for young people to become comfortable with sharing their own experiences or that of their friends and family. Some may choose to not share at all.
The experiences of our friends and family - what we have 'heard'
YDM is not about just one group of youths experiences, ideas and thoughts. It is important for this process to reach out to others and gather input and share those outcomes with others. There are a number of ways you can engage and consult others:
Constituency Building - Speaking with a broader voice than your own.
Text messaging: If your groups friends are people you want to hear from regarding your issue, you can text them and ask. Text messaging is being used more and more to gather input from young people. You can send the same text message to a large group at once and gather their responses as they come. Workshop / Focus Group: You can host your own workshop and facilitate a conversation to learn more about how other thinks about the issue. Your core group can help develop a series of questions and invite youth to join their group for a night or go to another organization to host a formal (or informal) workshop.
Quick questionnaires: You can always draft up a few questions and photocopy them. These can be distributed in your organizations, schools and amongst your friends to get some answers! You might need to sit down with each person and explain to them why they are being asked to do this. You can put a survey on line (Survey Monkey, Zoomerang, etc.)
Emails and Facebook messages: You are encouraged to send your questions along through online communication tools like email and Facebook to hear back from people all across the world! Remember to let them know when to get back to you by though.
Electronic Polling Sytems: If you have ever watched How To Be A Millionaire or Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader, you know how these work. You ask a large group of people a multiple choice question and they choose their answers on their response devices. Within seconds, you get to view the results in a graph format! These devices can be quite expensive and technical though. Should you want to learn how to use this contact Sharif at the SC.
You can search for surveys by others about the issue, and the opinions of young people. You can contact organizations that do work on the issue. They may have done consulting with their members. Often others need to be consulted to better understand how others are affected by the issue.
Which leads to…
The existing knowledge or research about a topic
The Blueprint website will have lots of valuable learnings generated to date including reports, posters, pamphlets, websites and activities. You can complement this by hosting speakers in your community from local women’s organizations, media, health centres or other individuals who have an interest in the issues related to violence in young women's lives.
The SC will also organize some cross-site sessions that can occur during this stage to help youth understand ideas and activities such as ‘gender based analysis’, research, effective approaches to addressing violence etc.
Weeks 13 - 18
Discussing the Issue
Facilitators guide the discussion using these questions as a starting place:
Questions:
- What surprised us?
- What is the most important thing we learned?
- What is the most interesting thing we learned?
- What do we think others should know?
- Were there other questions that we should have asked the large group?
- What are most people saying?
- What do we do with the other voices?
- What can we tell others about what we’ve learned from this study?
- Based on everything we’ve learned from our own experiences, from the research/resources we looked at, and from the survey we did, what recommendations do we want to make to adults about being good allies?
- What’s something that individuals, organizations or government can do to make a difference on the issues we've identified?
Weeks 19 - 22
Decision Making
What are the key messages your group wants to share? After weeks of discussion and reviewing what was studied another big question – how to decide as a group what are those key messages? There are many ways groups can make decisions. Here is a sample of some: INSERT CHART
Deciding how we decide It is crucial to recognize how is it that the group is going to arrive at their decision. What will happen with the minority voices? What are the pros and cons of the decision-making tools we want to use? Making the decision! Defining the group voice to others It’s time to analyze the results and figure out “what is it that we want to say to others?” What needs to happen around the issue that is not happening?
Weeks 23 - 25
Informing Youth, Young Adults and Organizations
Who do we want our workshops to speak to? Youth, young people in general, adults, parents, teachers, schools, media, the YDM Network, other organizations, schools and government are some of the options. Facilitators can work with young people to identify the audience for the workshops and the strategy in which to deliver them. Participants will work with the resources they have to deliver the workshops to their community. During this phase, participants will also outline their objectives for the workshops and how they arre going to evaluate success through the evaluation committee.
Weeks 26 - 30
Action!
This is where the group, now with a workshop in hand and new knowledge delivers them to the community. Participants will map out action and evaluation plans for how to deliver the workshops in the schools.
