Youth Forum work begins in Lochaber

A new youth community action group was formed on Wednesday the 18th of March when the first meeting of the new Lochaber Youth Forum took place in Fusion Youth Space in the Nevis Centre.

Supported by The Highland Council Youth Development staff, young representatives from across Lochaber met for the first time and started the process of making Lochaber a better place to grow up and be young using the 4 key themes identified by Highland Youth Voice as a template.
These are:

The 16 strong group of 12 – 17 year olds then identified a comprehensive list of issues there are for young people and the wider community in Lochaber with the aim of coming up with a strategy to tackle these issues on behalf of the Lochaber community. After much discussion and healthy debate the group then decided to tackle 6 projects as a priority in the coming year, these are;

Youth Club Questionnaires to be sent out to each young person in all schools across Lochaber to gauge interest in Youth Clubs and also attendance. If not attended then why? And how can workers make Youth Club’s and Space’s more appealing to more Young People. It was decided through discussions that the easiest ways of doing these questionnaires would be through Registration Classes in High Schools.

Councillors Eddie Hunter and Brian Murphy were also in attendance at the meeting and they, along with other locally based councillors have given their backing to working with and developing this new group with £400 from the local youth activity discretionary fund being granted to develop the work of the group.

Following the meeting Cllr Brian Murphy said: "I was very impressed by the good sense and enthusiasm of the young people and their imaginative ideas for improving local services. So often the older generation are critical of young adults without really trying to understand them. Many of us tend to forget what it was like to be young and have your concerns ignored. Highland Council’s programme Strengthening The Highlands, commits us to supporting youth fora and Highland Youth Voice, and to ensuring that their views are properly taken into account when developing future policy."

Forum co-ordinator and youth service worker for Highland Council’s youth development Rachel Carmichael said: "It is great to see this number of young people really taking an interest in Local issues and willing to be representatives of all young people across Lochaber, I felt very proud listening to the maturity and diplomacy of the discussions going on that evening and this is an exciting new project to get my teeth into, I am looking forward to seeing the results and outcomes that the young people will achieve!"

Highland Council’s Youth Development Officer for the Greater Fort William area Graeme Livingstone added: "It was an impressive start for this new group, they certainly hit the ground running and the issues identified and chosen to tackle were vastly important to young people and the wider community in Lochaber, the youth development team here will continue to work together with this group and all young people to make sure they can deliver some positive results for the people of Lochaber on these issues… we have a starting point and will now sit down with inter-agency colleagues, local councillors and other stakeholders to see how we can best deliver on these identified needs"

The group will meet again on the 14th of April.