We are the Alan Senitt Leadership team from Yavneh College. We want to raise awareness about issues regarding rough sleepers and the whole homeless community. Our project will educate people on what rough sleepers are and how we can help them. We have been getting in contact with local charities such as “Herts young homeless” and “Gratitude”. As well as this, after getting in contact with a charity run by “Gratitude” we were informed of a rough sleeper’s shelter in Shenley that holds 24 families, including children. As part of our project we would love to help the shelter by donating items they need and directly giving it to them. Our project will also break the stereotypes homeless people face and persuade the youth to donate and also make a change to their lives- even if it’s just a simple smile.
Through the program we have learnt how to: communicate well between our group, other schools, and students from backgrounds completely different to ourselves! As well as this, we have learnt the skills of being able to adapt, change and evolve our ideas based on each other and outside organisations and began to learn about leadership skills and ways to use initiative to solve problems. Some of us have also learnt new things about ourselves. For example, some of us are more creative then we had initially thought, some of us have improved our public speaking skills and are more confident around others.
Throughout this amazing programme, we have loved making new friends from different backgrounds and learning all about each other, the atmosphere at the seminars is always great. Sometimes it was quite challenging to agree with each other if many of us had different ideas. However, we listened to each other and agreed on an idea everyone was happy with. We decided to do our project on raising awareness for rough sleepers as the problems within it are much deeper than what can be seen on the surface- there are so many more people without stable homes then what we can see on the streets. This issue is very important and the issue is getting bigger- since 2010 the rough sleeping figure has increased by 141%.
Young people tend to have a lot of free time and we feel it should be used wisely: To make the world a better place. It is extremely important that young people are involved with projects like this and we believe that young people can make a very positive and big difference in the world. Young people can shape the future world that they’ll be living in. We really enjoyed going to the other schools and seeing what they were like and meeting many new friendly faces who are also making a positive change.
You can follow our journey and support us by following our project page on Instagram (@embrace_yc).
- Yavneh College, Alan Senitt Upstanders Leadership team
