Getting in touch with year 12s

Hi everyone,

I think I may have mentioned to you all in Rocky or on a teleconference about the Year 12 dinner celebration I have been planning for the end of October for Year 12 students that have been involved in Vinnies at high school. Unfortunately I only received one RSVP for this dinner and so it has been cancelled It seems timing was not right. The afternoon/evening was going to include;

● Badge/certificate presentation

● Games/activities

● Talks from young adults about what they’re doing in post-school Vinnies activities

● Reflections from students themselves

● Small liturgy

● Dinner

Plan B now is to send out some information (brochures, flyers) to schools tomorrow with a Volunteer details form for year 12 students to fill out if they are interested in finding out more about Vinnies projects next year and beyond. I hope this might be a way to tap into some of these students before the run off into the big wide world!


I feel one of the greatest challenges is fostering the link between school and post-school Vinnies involvement. The year 12 students seem to ‘drop off the radar’ after year 12. Does anyone have some examples from your areas/suggestions/thoughts of how we could get some better links between school and post school Vinnies?



Catherine

Catherine,

I sympathise with the difficulty you’ve had. The timing issue is a hard hurdle to overcome, what with exams, speech nights, graduation dinners, schoolies, and the general excitement of finishing school. Some schools’ Year 12s seem to basically close down on ‘extra-curriculars’ from July-August and the kids go into a different mode.

The idea of the dinner sounds wonderful. Perhaps it could become a larger Vinnies youth dinner, or even a Buddies Day Dinner. Do you have many school-aged volunteers with the buddies days? If so, they could be invited to the larger dinner along with everyone else, and it wouldn’t stand or fall just on them. They could still be singled out for some special attention, awards etc. We have a good number of Year 12s who volunteer for buddies days, and I hope we can extend that here to more schools. At the moment we are only drawing on kids from 2-3 schools. There is a lot more potential there.

Laine mentioned she has a youth conference of school-aged kids but based outside the school. This seems like a good strategy for the upper secondary kids, and I’m hoping we can try that in Townsville next year. That way the group has an independent life outside the school and there’s no reason to think they’ll drop out just because they leave school. We have a young adult group with ages from about 16 – 25 and we get a good group of school kids coming along to fortnightly meetings and participating in buddies days. I expect they’ll maintain their involvement. If anything, mixing with the older ones has been an attraction for them.

Good luck!