Youth Day 2014 – What an Experience!
October 15 2015
Monday 28th April 2014
The day started for me at 8.15am, this is when the Youth Committee met up to discuss the day ahead, and help Jo finish decorate the Youth Stall.
Youth Day started at 8.30am with the first mini master class…. How conference works’ around 20 young members attended this and it was hosted by Simon Sapper.
At 9am Conference began. This is where the Youth Video from the National Youth Education Event in Blackpool We are CWU Youth’ was introduced. This was my job….. It was well received apart from the slight technical hitch at the start… Modern technology!
10am the CWU Thunderclap burst. (A Thunderclap is where lots of people all tweet the same message at the same time to all their followers).
At 10.25am we took our young members into the conference hall to listen to the debate on proportionality.
Just before lunch at 12pm we had another of our mini master classes Spreading the Word’ – via social media this session was led by Ben Abrams and Daniel Lewis. In this session Ben and Dan helped some of our young members set up Twitter/Facebook accounts.
Lunch Time
After lunch at 14.30 the next mini master class took place. This was hosted by Jo Thair and myself. The workshop was called Becoming a Branch Youth Officer’ we went through the roles and responsibilities of becoming a Branch Youth Officer. This was followed by a short question and answer session. This session had around 30 young members in attendance.
It was then back to the main conference hall as some of our young members got to listen to the General Secretary Billy Hayes address the conference.
The final mini master class was How to get Involved’ this was hosted by Ben Abrams and myself. It covered topics on how to write blogs, do vlogs and podcasts; we also informed the young members about upcoming events for example the nextNational Youth Education Event, which will be held in Edinburgh on 3-5th October 2014.
That then closed the Youth Day.
I feel it was a success and we got contact details of around 70 young members. We are hoping that the day went some way to bring in a fresh new group of CWU young activists to get inspired and be more involved.
During the day we held a competition to win a Kindle and an iTunes Voucher. The competition involved taking selfies with members of the youth committee and people wearing the youth day t-shirts.
After 6 months of promoting the day and encouraging branches to get involved we feel that the day was a success. It is now up to all of us – Youth Committee, Branches and Regions to follow up on this and continue to communicate with these young members to ensure they stay active and stay involved.
