YOUTH BOARD: LAUNCHED!
Change is coming and it looks like young people are leading it!
Here at Comics Youth CIC, we value authentic youth voice, youth leadership and young people being at the forefront of all we do here. For the past few years, we have been finetuning what we mean when we say we are ‘youth-led’ and how we can formalise that process to be more embedded into our governance, decision making processes and community work. While we were founded by, and continue to have, marginalised young people at the heart of all we do- there is always more we can do to get closer to equity.
For the past year, we have been undergoing a ‘restructure process’, this means that we took a step back at everything we have done and continue to do and make decisions on how we can do better. Better for our community, our staff, our wellness, and our drive towards a more equitable society. We changed our policies, we rejigged our sessions, looked at our goals as an organisation and engaged in a LOT of deep listening. Listening to funders, young people, our members, our staff team, partner projects and organisations we admire who we believe share our drive for best practice when supporting young people.
From this process the Comics Youth, Youth Board, was born! Starting in November 2022, we recruited 18 marginalised young people who are passionate about youth social action, the third sector, youth voice and making a positive change to the communities they belong to and are living amongst. It is this innate passion for change that we hope to harvest and dig deeper into by providing our Youth Board with the opportunity to be heard, to learn and to refine their passions, as well as redirecting anger around failing systems into productive change making.
Our Youth Board will make a difference to the lives of hundreds of marginalised children and young people who join our projects each year, and supporting the organisations work of:
Developing the first young person led Publishing House in the UK.
Supporting the next generation of lived experience led changemakers.
Informing the organisation on what areas of projects require change and reform.
Observing our team at work, offer ideas to make CY better and co-create content and co-design strategies to make lives better for young people in our city.
Delivering projects that create important social change.
Improving access to youth services for children and young people.
Our Youth Board will meet 4 times a year, with ample opportunities throughout the full year such as mentoring, training, 1-2-1 support, personal and professional development opportunities and the chance to be a representative, with full voting rights, in our wider board meetings with industry professionals, trustees and experts of the third sector.
Throughout our time with the Youth Board, we will be dedicated to listening and learning from every single person in our board meetings. To do this fairly, we have two Working Groups based on the young people’s interest areas. They are the:
Operational Working Group- Focusing on policies, funding, relations, networking, community, structural changes, parity of pay.
Sustainability Working Group- Focusing on holistic approaches to work, wellbeing, community work, policy re-writes, projects we run, programme developments.
The working groups allow our board of 18 people to be split into smaller groups, allowing more time for everybody to be heard, valued, and ensure we can achieve more change and influence from young people within limited time windows. Running a CIC is busy work which our Youth Board are now embedded into!
Our Youth Board are valued members of Comics Youth CIC and are in a real position of leadership. Every idea, piece of feedback, resource development and thoughts shared will be distributed across the whole of Comics Youth CIC via meeting minutes, staff meetings to catch up changes and embedded into the organisation’s strategy for the years ahead.
We have begun to develop our relationship with our Youth Board this month, having our first introductory meeting on December 10th, 2022. We have a lot of planning, brainstorming, learning, and listening ahead of us next year, so we will be sharing all of that with everybody via our blogs too! Want to read about how our first Youth Board meeting went? Check it out here.