The Regional Youth Work Unit – North East has been exploring a variety of ways in which social media and emerging digital technology can support the development of youth work and the empowerment of the young people of our region.
In July The Unit was successful in gaining funding from the Policy and Representation Partnership to support our new Net Assets Project. Net Assets will support practitioners across the region to help young people develop local campaigns.

Our plan was to work with young people to develop a campaign using social media. By campaign we don’t mean supporting regime change or something with a negative focus: it may be an issue with local transport, it could be around how they are portrayed in the media. Whatever it is we want young people to determine the focus themselves and then support them to develop the work.

In two successful seminars with professionals we discussed the boundaries they face in using social media in a youth work setting and gave them ideas and hints to overcome these issues. We also learnt from young people associated with Unit as well as the professionals the issues they feel are prominent at this time. From this the focus for this campaign will be… Youth Unemployment.

A meeting was had with young people to discuss their use of social media and they way they see it intergrating into their everyday lives. Links were highlighted between social media and political engagement and other successful campaigns were shown. 

A second meeting will take place on the 21st April where we will hopefully kick of the campaign by making a short film to be distributed through social media sites about where youth unemployment could take us. If any young people in the North East would like to attend please contact ria@rywu.org.uk

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Find out more:Net Assets @ The Regional Youth Work Unit - North East