Jill Suggate, Act Now's intern, talks
about bridging the gap between professionals and young people, from
a 3 things perspective...
Here at Inspire we've discovered that a lot
of professionals out would love to do a better job of connecting
with young people in their work. The problem is figuring out
how.
We're pretty sold on the idea of bringing
in technology to help bridge the gap between the professional and
the young person. Trying to convince other organisations or
professionals is normally not much of a task. The main obstacle
holding professionals back from engaging more technology in their
practice is knowledge. Trying to figure out what technology's
relevant, how to use it and why it's so important to young people
can be really time consuming.
The ActNow program (Reach
Out's sister program) is an online community of young people
interested in making change in their communities. They use the
website as a place to share ideas, resources and lessons learnt
from actions taken all over Australia.
We also work with community organisations
to help combat give professionals the tools and knowledge they need
to start integrating technology into their work with young people.
Each month, we send out a monthly newsletter to professionals and
community organisations full of ideas and tips to make the
technology transition as easy as possible.
The '3 Things' newsletter sifts through all
the tech-talk and spits out an easy to understand, bite-sized
version of the latest in technology trends. We want to keep our
articles relevant to those in the youth field, so we stick to the
ways in which technology can be used when working with young people
specifically.
We also look at how to engage young people
offline - in workshops, putting them in decision maker roles and
through other participation models. We've also picked up a bunch of
tips from some amazing young leaders and the organisations they
work with about how to get young people excited about and engaged
in social change to help build that all important sense of self
efficacy. If you want to have a look, they're all stored
safely away in our past
issues archive.
If you think the monthly 3 Things
newsletter might be of value for your work (we certainly do!), then
you can sign up for the next issue here.