Youth COP

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This year we are excited to have formed a partnership of Dorset Local Nature Partnership, DCAN, Sustainable Dorset, Coastland College and Dorset Council to run Dorset’s first Youth COP.

The Youth COP will be held on Friday 13 November, kindly hosted by Coastland College at their Kingston Maurward campus, linked to their annual Environment Week.

A Youth COP could take many forms, and with the event taking place on a weekday, we decided to focus on a day we could invite schools and Elective Home Education students to take part in. 

Evidence shows that young people begin to lose a connection to the environment around 11 years old and this peaks at around 15 years old. We therefore decided to focus on Year Nine students with the aim of inspiring them to reconnect and inspire them to take action, in the year they will be choosing their GCSE options.

Schools across Dorset and BCP council areas have been invited and currently 14 have shown an interest, along with a couple of Elective Home Educated families.

We have pulled together an exciting day including three workshops that all students will attend in rotation:

• What Happens Next?   Exploring Environmental Issues, Emotions & Action –  using a game to help understand eco emotions and how to address these and  take action
• Mad  to Magic: Future Rebels 2040 – using the Lego Serious Play methodology
• Nature’s  Heroes – using creativity (storyboards, blogs or poems) to highlight how  we can support our wildlife habitats and species though developing a hero

All the students will then come together to hear from a range of people working in the environmental sector through a careers panel discussion.

Students from Coastland College and Blandford Schools Year 12s will be supporting the running of the workshops as well as taking photos and hopefully filming parts of the day and interviewing the year nine students.

More details about the workshops can be read in our programme (see  below)

We hope to use this year as a trial to see what we can develop in future years.

If you have any queries about the Youth COP, please email info@dorsetlnp.org.uk