Last weekend (25th-27th March) we (the MYP’s) went to Hooke Court in Dorset for our annual Southwest Regional residential. The point of the residential was to meet other MYP’s, participate in workshops and have some fun.
On the first day, a Friday, we - after reaching Hooke Court – we attended ‘Ice breaker’ sessions which aided us in getting to know each other and finding out more about the group and ourselves.
The second day (in the morning) was more about the roles and responsibilities of being an MYP. In the first workshop we participated in was about ‘everything you need to know about being an MYP’ – this entailed jargon busting, understand who decision makers are, how they think and work and we also created action plans to help us with our local campaigns. The second session was all about ‘media training’ in the workshop we looked at different types of media and what their target audiences were. We also looked at the best ways to approach and respond to the media and any queries they may have. Also we played a game which put a real life perspective on radio and television interviews.
The afternoon part of the second day was a bit of history, as we were staying at a roman heritage site. We made some roman jewellery, roman oil lamp burners and we tried to make some roman food - some bread, soup and goat sausages and for a sweet an apricot, date and honey sweet.
In the evening we all took part in a Ceilidh, a funny dance sort of thing, where we all made complete fools of ourselves but had a brilliant time doing it.
On the Sunday the first workshop was about safety and responsibility online and different methods of communications between us and our constituents and between ourselves, and the rest of the south west region.
The second workshop of the day was about local and regional manifestos and priorities - this session was led by us, the Gloucestershire MYP’s. During this workshop each local authority group had to share their three priorities they would be working on concerning their areas. We then collated the results and through a nail-biting vote came up with the three official UK Youth Parliament Southwest priorities for our regional manifesto, they are: Health, Media and Positive Activities.
Our last sessions were about the code of conduct for the southwest and planning for the next regional meeting which will be on Wednesday 13th of April. Then we all had a group photo and filled out an evaluation form. It was then time to say our goodbyes and then depart back to our respective areas.
Overall it was an amazing experience in which we all learnt a lot, worked hard, had fun, enjoyed ourselves and met a lot of new people and made new friends.
