Highly Sprung is a charity that has been working with and for children & young people for over 20 years. As part of this, it is more important than ever that our board is reflects our actual audience – young people aged 14 to 25. Following our recruitment over the Summer, we now have 10 fantastic young people on our first cohort of our Youth Advisory Board (YAB) for 2022 – 2023. Today the wonderful Zoe takes us behind the scenes and shares some exciting plans from our first ever meeting.
How does the Youth Advisory Board work?
The YAB will come together 4 times a year to meet and consider key focuses for Highly Sprung, engaging with our community and artistic input into our work. A report from each YAB meeting will be brought to the full Trustee Board of the Charity, allowing the Board and Executive team to consider all points raised by the YAB, feeding into our strategy and future plans. We also want to support the YAB members with their own personal development, especially around teamwork skills over their year with us.
Highlights of our first YAB meeting
September has seen our first YAB away day, where our group got to know each other, more about Highly Sprung as an organisation and charity, and how our YAB meetings will work. We also have had our first official YAB meeting where the group were presented with their very snazzy YAB pin badges – made of course from 100% recycled plastic, with custom pins courtesy of the brilliant Sticker Mule!
As part of the first meeting, the YAB firstly considered the theme for the Physical Fellowship 2023 – a chance to come up with the big but relevant topic for festival participants to interpret and explore. After narrowing it down to a shortlist of 3, the YAB handed over the final decision to Sarah Worth, Executive Director, who chose FREEDOM.
The group also developed some exciting ideas for a new project we have coming up in February, thinking about community engagement and outreach – watch this space for more details.
Finally, the YAB had a really insightful and in-depth discussion about Highly Sprung’s environmental plan and how we share what we do on social media. For the Sprung team, this is where the Youth Advisory Board is so important – we want to hear directly from our young people their thoughts and opinions to help shape our future plans and future opportunities for their peers. From this discussion, some exciting suggestions came out that along with the YAB we need to now shape and move forward.
We are really looking forward to the next YAB meeting in November!