HOST A WORKSHOP

We’re using creative methods in our Making a Living project to uncover your experiences on how you cope with trying to make a living. We’ll use these to develop scenarios and a guide on how, through the process of coping with the crisis, young people are creating new ways of making a living.

One of the ways you can get involved is by hosting a workshop to stimulate discussion and get people to interview each other one to one. Take a look below at the tips we learnt from our previous workshops.

One of the things we’ve learnt from our previous workshops is that some people find it difficult to talk about the issues without prompts, so we’ve produced a guide of stimulant cards you can use to prompt people to talk about the different issues young people face. Inspired by semiotics, you ask people to pick a selection of keywords and discuss them. Let us know how you get on!

Embrace the mess, you need rules for radicals not for robots

The start of anything new is inevitably uncomfortable and confusing. Allow for this, as people move closer to getting involved in your activities. If you try to move too quickly to rigidly planning everything, they won’t feel a sense of ownership in it, or at least that’s our excuse…

That’s why when we organise workshops we introduce what we do and why we do it in a very informal way, while at the same time encouraging them to help shape our future activities.

Don’t take them for granted, value them as people you couldn’t do without

When people do decide to get involved and give freely of their time and energy, recognise and value their efforts.

This can be as simple as thanking them regularly, buying a round of drinks or getting them to lead parts of your activity. It’s a tricky tightrope to let people discover what they want to do and to galvanise their energies to get involved. Different people have different motivations and skills, which are shaped not just by their lives but also by their moods. What they might be interested one day, they might not the other, or vice versa.

This is even more important to consider when you have a group like ours which is run by volunteers. Some prefer running the workshops, others coordinating the work and others putting forward ideas. These are all interdependent , you need a variety of people picking up the baton and sharing between each other, knowing that if they need to pass on the baton for whatever reason, someone else is always there to catch it.

Start with your personal story

Test it out after this session down the pub, talk about what the spark was that got you involved and quickly you’ll find that people will get excited about the values you stand for.