What did Build Our Futures do in 2020?

Despite an uncertain year, what is certain is that our BOF groups were amazing at continuing to get young people’s voices heard during a challenging time.

Anti-bullying group: Discussed creating an anti-bullying policy and what would be included in the policy, including bullying in friendships and the difference between banter vs bullying.

BOF also took part in Anti-bullying week, which saw the people in Wakefield taking photos of their odd socks!

Improvement board: Took part in the training opportunities such as resilience and listening training.

Took part in mystery shopping activities that highlighted issues in services.

Emotional Wellbeing:  Talked to the Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) about the Trailblazer Bid; a way to get more mental health professionals into schools.

Consulted on the WF-I-Can Website. The group gave their ideas for its improvement and helped make a jingle for a radio advertising.

Consulted on the Devolution Bid for Wakefield and poor transport is a big issue for children who don’t live near the town centres.

Looked at developing our own BOF Training scheme starting with Restorative Practice so that we can learn to manage conflict and learn from difficult situations.  The training would go on to include Listening, Resilience Anti-Discrimination and Peer Mentoring.

Youth Parliament: Created a Knife Crime poster and met with the police crime commissioner to discuss issues such as hate crime and Black Lives Matter

Met with professionals such as the director of health to discuss Covid

Took part in UK Youth parliament week

Promoted and was involved in the biggest survey amongst young people – ‘Make your Mark and receiving over 8000 votes for Wakefield. This highlighted the need for technology poverty and mental health services to be addressed by local councillors.

BOF Summit 2020: The build our Futures Summit in November was for the first time held virtually. This saw professionals from different professions such as Police, Health and Education come together to answer questions directly from young people. These questions were how covid has impacted you and your family, what young people think of their area and what question they had for the interview panel

Over 100 people attended that showcased work from all groups and areas (such as cicc coir!).

Andy Lancashire mentioned how one of the priorities identified by the Make your Mark voting (where we had a fantastic 8076 votes cast in Wakefield) was technology poverty.

It is therefore really great to see that following a fantastic push by councillors, the ‘WFConnect’ concept has come to life.