THE Wellington City Council Youth group have completed another year with great success according to Youth Council director Simon Wright.
“The annual report shows how much work they’ve done and they have been getting out and talking to youth and get their opinions,” he told NewsWire.
The youth group, chaired by Jack Marshall, who has also been elected Tawa community board had a busy year, starting from February’s youth engagement for the Wellington City council to deciding their end of year celebrations.
The Wellington City Youth Council is a group between the age of 12 and 24 set up under the term for reference to provide the Wellington City Council with a youth perspective on the range of issues covered by the council.
2013 Youth Councillors have been involved with all sort of meetings and they met with the delegation from the Indonesian Ministry of Youth and Sport in November.
One of the first big works was the Wellington City Council Alcohol Management strategy in February, the youth council decided they want to get involved and actively take part.
“The Youth Council decided to extend the process of community engagements to other youth organization,” Jack said.
“The aim of the workshop was to get young people involved in local decision making”
“It was great to see a range of youth presents, from year nine pupils through to tertiary students,”
The Youth Council have made more oral submissions this year than any previous years and they met twenty two times.
During Youth Week, the group invited Wellington City Councillors and the CEO to a breakfast which was paid for by Mayors’ Taskforce for jobs grant.
One of the issues the Youth Council have faced this year was that there are no budget available for Youth Council , which resulted in the group to request for grant funding for its outreach work.
They unsuccessfully applied to the Ministry of Youth Development for a grant of $42,000 for an online project which promote earthquake preparedness in Wellington youth.
The Youth Council participated in the local body election by running VotWell.org to provide youth about whom the candidates were and what general policies they had, and it was a success according to Jack Marshall.
“In addition to completing its intended goal of giving young people relevant information’s, we believe that we now have the knowledge to run a similar project in the future,” Jack said.
This year the Youth Council was made up of fifty seven per cent females and forty three per cent male.
