Last week, three youth delegates – Elysia Mackay, Angus Kemmis and I – attended the 2017 NSW Youth Council Conference in Ryde city with the support of the Gunning District Association.
The theme of this year's conference was ‘make IT happen’, with the event focussing on empowering young leaders through the use of technology.
As soon as we arrived the atmosphere felt alive and welcoming. It was very encouraging and inspiring to meet so many young leaders making a difference in their own communities and making connections with other Youth Councils.
The conference was opened by His Excellency General The Honourable David Hurley AC DSC (Ret'd), Governor of NSW.
During the conference we were given the opportunity to listen to an abundance of young speakers describing how technology has allowed them to have a voice in their community.
We were also given the opportunity attend a Q and A session with The Honourable Raymond Williams MP, minister for multiculturalism and disability services, Mr John Alexander OAM MP, member for Bennelong, and Dr Mehreen Faruqi MLC.
Later we were able to attend a variety of workshops teaching us new skills to implement in our own ongoing activities in Gunning.
We developed skills to better organise and plan youth and community activities, and will be collaborating with a number of youth councils to plan a community event on December 1 and 2. The youth councils will be sharing ideas and information to ensure the events are successful.
As a cohort of councils, we have been able to design an event planning process which we hope to integrate into all of our community and youth activities, with the upcoming event in December being the first trial of the planning process.
After the event is held, surveyed information gathered by the councils from their events will be shared among, us so that we can see how we can improve and develop our community planning.
We would like to say a big thank you to the Gunning District Association and Ryde City council for supporting us so that we could attend the event.
More information for the upcoming event will be available later in October, when we will also begin establishing our social media pages. Thank you everyone for your support.
