1st exchange report

1st exchange: Carlow Regional Youth Service and Banbridge High School

written by the Carlow young people
 

Our 1st exchange was from the 24th -26th November 2008 and took place in Carlow. The Banbridge students along with their teacher and Banbridge youth centre youth worker were greeted by five members of the Carlow group and were brought to The Vault (Carlow Regional Youth Service) to meet the rest of the Carlow students. The Vault is a new project, funded by the Young Peoples Facilities and Services Fund and the V.E.C. and run by Carlow Regional Youth Services (CRYS) and provides young people with a space to meet and work.

Upon arrival in The Vault, the Banbridge group was extended a warm welcome by the Carlow young people and their leaders from the Carlow School Completion Programme and Carlow Regional Youth Service.

As well as lots of fun activities, the groups completed 5 workshops on their 1st exchange, which were deisgned to help the 2 groups get to know each other, share information and make decisions about which problem to choose.

What an exchange involves

For the purpose of the two groups getting to know each other and to get everyone mixing from the start, we played some icebreaker games. Once we had begun to make friendships, we then made a group contract and talked about our hopes and fears. Some of our hopes were to become friends and that by taking part in this project, we will make a difference.

One of the activities in the next workshop was where both groups shared our group and community profiles, which was very interesting as it showed us how many things we had in common. The reason for sharing these is so we get a better insight into our partners and to explore what we and our communities have in common. This led onto sharing information about our community problems.

We discovered that both communities have similar problems revolving around underage drinking and violence. Carlow students will be looking at
violence with underage drinking as a cause and Banbridge students will be looking at underage drinking and how it can cause violence.

As we mentioned above, we also had time just to have fun and get to know our partners.
During the exchange we spent time relaxing and making friendships in the new "Vault" Project. We had the opportunity to take part in a sports session on the Astro Turf pitch in the Institute of Technology, Carlow where we all learnt the basics of Lacrosse and played Tag Rugby.
We visited Carlow County Council where Cllr Denis Foley, Cathaoirleach, greeted us and we spent time in Carlow Vocational School where Mr Joe Rattigan, Deputy Principal, and Sinead O’ Keeffe, School Completion Co-ordinator, welcomed them
On the same day the groups returned to the Vault for some team building activities. Using innovative methods, the groups bridged the gap between Carlow and Banbridge.
We completed the 5 Civic-Link workshops and had time for other activities as well, namely playing Lacrosse and Tag Rugby and visiting Carlow County Council. This visit gave the young people a chance to meet with local politicians and the opportunity to explore how they can take action at public policy level.

One of the main tasks of this 1st exchange is to decide on a problem that we would like to solve. To be able to decide this, we first had to talk about our group and communities. This helped to give us an understanding of each other and where we live.

Once we had exchanged this information, we then began talking about our community problems. These were classified into 3 groups: problems just in Banbridge/Carlow and then problems experienced by both communities. We chose to focus on these and choose a common problem from the following list:
•    Underage drinking
•    Teenage violence
•    Boy racers
We felt choosing a common problem would give us opportunities to communicate more and help each other to solve our common problem. After a discussion where we clearly identified what the problem actually was and how it was affecting our communities, we agreed that Banbridge would focus on underage drinking and how it causes violence and Carlow would explore violence caused by underage drinking.

The exchange was a great success and we are all looking forward to visiting the Banbridge group in the New Year.