Recruitment
Your first task will be to recruit youth to participate:
You will be recruiting both boys and girls, between the ages of 12 and 21 years old. Our recommendation is that you focus on younger youth although there is flexibility as to the age of your participants. Remember that the broader the age of youth involved, the more challenging it could be to facilitate weekly groups.
Youth Engagement Framework:
We look at activities in terms of what gets youth involved and/or prevents them from getting involved. We understand that there will be things at three levels of their lives that may help or prevent their getting involved. As individuals things like their values, beliefs, and interests matter. As members of a social group their friends, family, youth workers, coaches or mentors may influence them. As members of a larger societal group or system, the influences of their youth centre, school, community, province or country matter. We then look at what keeps them involved and/or prevents them from staying involved (sustainers) at the same individual, social and system levels.
- Centre of Excellence for Youth EngagementUsing the Framework as a guide you will be looking for youth who may have shown an interest in violence prevention or gender based issues or programs before or those who you know have a set of beliefs or values that would match this program (individual). You may reach out and ask other youth influencers (like teachers, coaches or youth workers) to help identify youth they think would have an interest and ask youth who have already become involved to help recruit their friends and family (cousins, siblings etc.) (social). You could do a brief presentation in spaces in your community that youth already have a connection to, such as in a school or youth centre and encourage those spaces to support and encourage youth to participate. (system).
You are looking for youth who:
- Have diverse experiences, backgrounds and ideas.
- May have lived experience in relation to issues of violence or violence in young women’s lives.
- Have an interest in addressing the issue of violence in young women’s lives.
- Can commit to a 3 1/2 hour weekly program for up to 30 weeks this year.
- Are open to the idea of sharing what they work on this year in the second year of the program where they are paid to share their new knowledge with their community.
- May have not been invited to participate in programs such as this before.
Once you have recruited youth you will want to have a list with all of their contact information so that you can easily reach them and connect (phone, cell, email or Facebook name) throughout the project. All youth participants should also sign a Students Commission Media Release Form allowing the Students Commission to use the materials they produce, pictures or video of them or other content developed by your group in furthering our work to support children and youth in Canada.
When you have youth recruited and start planning your meetings you will want to determine when and where you are meeting. It has been our experience that having the same day, time and location is key to sustaining youth’s participation in weekly programming.
