Rowing Regatta
YSI
Our YSI journey began in September of 4th year in 2010 when 17 successful applicants were brought together to create a project about something we felt passionate about as Young Social Innovators. Thus, the ‘Promoting Positive Teen Relationships Project: Because Of You’ began. [nggallery id=4]
We choose this project as we felt that healthy teen relationships were vital and it was essential that an understanding of what a healthy teen relationship is should be highlighted in an awareness raising campaign. We also hoped to be recognised at the YSI ‘Speak Out’ in City Hall as we performed amongst all the other hopefuls on that particular day.
There was a lot of hard work involved in putting our project together. It started with researching our topic to find information on different relationships and how we treat others in our relationships. We researched in the internet, conducted surveys, and spoke to organisations that worked with people in negative relationships. We invited in guest speakers from Mna Feasa and a home school liaison officer who spoke to us about positive relationships amongst adults and teens. We held an awareness day in Blackpool Shopping Centre in which we distributed handmade information packs in our project colours of yellow and purple as well as stickers with our project title on them and lollipops. We also created a Facebook group as it would be a great and easy way to gain recognition of our project. We displayed statistics in the library to help raise awareness of relationships. Finally we performed our sketch at Cork City Hall in the Munster ‘Speak Out’ in the hope of qualifying to go forward to the finals in Dublin. When we found out that we had succeeded we were delighted to know that all the hard work had paid off.
Upon our arrival at the Dublin finals the anticipation and excitement was incredible. We were surrounded by fun activities such as a silent disco and bouncing castles. Before we knew it, it was time for our YSI performance of our project on stage. We had practiced this performance and had performed it several times before. The excitement of doing it once more pushed us to perform it to the best of our ability.
The award ceremony was held later on in the day with 4000 people present including some very important guests such as Enda Kenny, Mary Kennedy and Mary Black. We were more than thrilled on hearing our name announced as the winner of our category and we all hurried towards the stage in sheer excitement to accept our award.
We felt incredibly proud and thankful for this award and the help we had received from our YSI teacher Mrs. Whelan and the school throughout the year. We hope we have made people, especially teens, aware of the importance of positive teen relationships and in doing so have helped teenagers recognise that they are not alone. We are exceptionally grateful for our YSI experience. Our victory was the ‘cherry on top’ of a wonderful transition year.
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