Youth Citizenship Awards:
Louisburgh Foróige love getting involved in community projects, and every time we do, we become better Citizens. Pictured below, Louisburgh Foróige was the first ever county Mayo Foróige club to win a Foróige Citizenship award, this was in 1970-71.
We recently attended the Foróige Citizenship awards in the RDS in Dublin. This was a great honour and our club did really well.
More info on the Foróige, Citizenship Programme:
The below info was published by Foróige Ireland, please visit their website where you will find a whole host of other information about this wonderful opportunity.
Visit their website ---> here.
About the Programme
Citizenship has been core to Foróige’s work for over 40 years, and the Foróige Youth Citizenship Programme in partnership with Aldi Ireland is a youth development programme that empowers young people to use their talents and initiative to make a positive difference to the world around them. It involves young people researching the needs of their community, organising practical action in response, evaluating the effectiveness of their work and reflecting on what they’re learning along the way.
Background:
The Citizenship Programme was established by Foroige in 1969. Youth civic engagement or citizenship refers to young people taking action to make their communities, schools or society a better place, by volunteering to do socially valuable work. Promoting active citizenship among young people has the benefit of both improving communities and promoting the social, psychological and intellectual growth of the young person. The core model underpinning the programme is one of ‘awareness, action, evaluation’ whereby young people undertake a three phased approach to identifying and responding to a community or social issue.
Aim & Outcomes:
Foróige’s Youth Citizenship Programme in partnership with Aldi Ireland aims to enable young people to make a positive difference in their community by taking part in a citizenship project. The programme will motivate and equip young people to:
Define what citizenship means to them
Research their community’s needs
Illustrate ways in which to benefit their community
Plan a project to meet an identified need using a planning model
Organise and manage their project
Evaluate the effectiveness of their project
Demonstrate improved communication skills, collaboration and civic responsibility
Receive positive recognition from their community
A sample of our 2016-17 foroige citizenship project:
September - November:
This year, the leaders have decided to take a whole year approach to the Foróige youth citizenship awards in partnership with Aldi Ireland and deliver it in five sections.
Leaders have been talking a lot in club with members about youth citizenship over the last number of weeks, each week the leaders try to plant a seed and discuss lots of little ideas that could easily be turned into a citizenship project, but at this point more time is spent simply chatting with members about past projects that foroige have been doing in our community and how these past projects were submitted to the Foróige youth citizenship awards, at this point, it's more of an evaluation of how these past project have had a positive impact in our community and even now, the effects of our efforts from years gone by are still a great talking point when you mention Foróige around the village.
Louisburgh foroige are lucky enough to have retained some of the leaders that have been involved in these past projects and now have gained experience in taking these projects to a nation level. These leaders now have a great insight of how it all works and they have a better understanding of the whole youth citizenship and the ethos behind it. From attending the national events over the last few years our leader have also gained great knowledge about what other clubs are doing and they now have forged some good friendships with other clubs all coming from attending the Foróige citizenship awards.
All our leaders agree that having Aldi involved over the last few year has provided a great boost to the citizenship program, their involvement does offer Foróige the opportunity to stage bigger, better and more action packed events, especially the awards ceremony itself. Also, seeing Foróige mentioned in some Aldi advertisements on the TV really connects with the members and they feel they are part of something good, something very special and they can make a difference. Aldi is a fantastic brand and it would be great if their support of Foróige, and the young people involved will continues into the future.
Section one, "what is the Foróige youth citizenship awards" and "what is it all about":
Following on from informal discussions at club nights, in late November the leaders arrange a leader meeting to get everyone around the same table and discuss citizenship and what the program was really all about, from this, longer standing leaders agreed to get all the info together from the Foróige portal to deliver this entire program in five different sections to our members over the next 6-7 months with a view to completing this around April-May 2017.
With the leaders more informed, primed and ready, it was time to start. At a regular club meeting in Louisburgh Town Hall on Tuesday 6th of December it is finally time to get to grips on citizenship and try get a project together that everyone could get involved in. It was agreed by the members that a small sub-group would take on the running of this years project and a number of members put themselves forward to take on the challenge, to hit the ground running, a workshop evening was quickly arranged for the following evening and the excitement started to build. What will we do? Will we be goin got Dublin? Will we be on the telly again? were all questions now buzzing around the hall.
On Wednesday evening the 7th of December 10 members and a number of leaders assembled in the pastoral Centre locally to get things started. With clipboards, pens, citizenship info from the Foróige portal, laptop and projector at the ready the leaders were now ready to get things started, this meeting will be about why we are doing this and no project ideas would be agreed upon at this meeting. The leaders want the members to fully understand what the Foróige citizenship program is all about and to try give members a better understand of what being a good citizen can mean to them and to their community.
We started by asking, what is Foróige citizenship and what does it mean to you? Some blank faces, some assumptions, a very mixed responses and we moved on.
The evening was upbeat and fun with the leaders agreeing amoung themselves there will be no wrong answers throughout the evening, after a little more discussion as to what makes you a citizen and how being a good citizen simple doing little things every day within their own lives makes them good citizens, the leaders did the three statement word puzzle from the portal with them and this itself turned up some very interesting results and interesting discuessions soon followed. The leaders then moved onto the 10 scenarios, again from the portal, and the ideas and suggestions were flowing out by this stage, what makes me a better citizen, what would you do to insure your community was aware, all great scenarios and the group really got stuck into each and every topic.
Before the leaders finished the evening, an informal chat took place with the members about what they had learnt over the evening and again the leaders asked the same question that started the night, what is Foróige citizenship and what does it mean to you? The answers this time were more definitive and it was clear by this stage, our members now had a much better understanding of what Foróige citizenship awards and been a good citizen in their own community was all about.
The night finished up with some youtube clips of Foróige citizenship award events from recent years shown on the projector. Free time followed this, however, the members were still chatting about what they had learnt among themselves and the leaders could overhear little discussions taking place about project ideas they could do going forward.
Section two, awareness:
Section three, action:
Section four, evaluation:
Section five, the presentation: