Hi, welcome to our blog. We are the Young people’s Development Group (YPDG). We are young people who have come together to help create Horizon Youth Zone in Grimsby. This blog is to keep a log of our progress and achievements as we continue to work towards the opening of Horizon Youth Zone and the many opportunities that it will bring.
Welcome back to our blog. February was an exciting month so keep on reading to hear what we’ve been up to.
Firstly, we wanted to talk about our weekly sports sessions. We have been lucky enough to have sports sessions provided by 2020 community sport. Everyone thoroughly enjoys these sessions and Neil and Jane have built up our resilience. We have been introduced to lots of different sports that we have never done before such as indoor curling, blind cricket, and bowls. Josh really enjoyed blind cricket even though ‘the ball was going all over the place.’ We are quite a competitive group with Izzy being champion at table cricket quoting, ‘I beat everyone’ and Biff saying, ‘I am not a sport person, but I am now an indoor curling champion.’ One of the young people in the group, Rachel, has joined her local bowls club after playing in the sports sessions because she enjoyed it so much. Kevin thought playing bowls and croquet at People’s Park was a ‘fantastic team building session’. Overall, we have all gained a lot from these sports sessions and we continue to enjoy trying new things, especially now that we have just got some new equipment which enabled us to play dodgeball in our last session.
The 1st of February was Chinese New Year, so we learnt about Chinese New Year and did lots of fun activities such as looking up our animals, learning about Chinese culture and having a chopstick competition which Josh won, closely followed by Molly in second place. We all had lots of fun and learnt a lot too. As well as all of this we also found out the very exciting news that we had received the grant for the sand dunes project.
We finally also got to have our bowling night which was postponed from Christmas. Before bowling we were met by Jacob from America who we are working with for our exchange trip to Boston in the summer. We all enjoyed talking to Jacob and hearing more about America and specifically New Bedford. Bowling was a fun night, and everyone was supportive and enthusiastic.
In another session, although depleted in numbers, we were joined by Pippa who visited us to tell us about the amazing work that other youth groups do across North East Lincolnshire. We were told about the Youth Action Group and the Young Investigators Group. They are doing great work and we were encouraged to tell anyone about the groups who may be interested in joining. The main thing I took from the session was that these groups really do give young people a voice and young people’s opinions are valued.
In February we also took a trip to Wigan Youth Zone for a day with the young ambassadors group. It was a great day where we got to know each other and joined the youth zone’s celebrations for LGBT+ history month. There were lots of fun activities on during the evening such as roller skating, karaoke, and this cool inflatable wrecking ball game. On the way we even experienced a snow storm.
In our last meeting of February, we had Lisa join us who is self-employed and works to develop the arts in Grimsby. She found there was a lack of opportunities in Grimsby when growing up, especially post-18 when finishing education. After finishing college, she took a gap year and connected with other artists in Grimsby. Lisa has developed a club, lowercase theatre, to help people get on stage as an alternative option to going to university. We did activities in pairs where we spoke about our childhoods growing up in Grimsby and our hopes for the future. This was interesting as everyone had experienced different opportunities or lack of opportunities.
February was a great month for the group, and we hope to see you next month to hear about what we’ve been up to in March.
