Norfolk Homewatch Saturday 16th May 2009

On Saturday I attended the Norfolk Homewatch event at County Hall. I had been invited to be a member of the 'question time' panel representing 'youth'. Not an enviable task at a 'homewatch' meeting given that I am sure most people there had issue with 'youth' for one reason or another. The main two questions I answered were about how to get more young people involved in Homewatch and their community. The main jist of my answer was that new technologies; i.e. blogs, facebook etc should be utilised far more then they are now - improving accessibility and the other question was around addressing the issue of youth nuisance / anti-social behaviour, so I reminded the audience that Norfolk has one of the lowest funded youth services in the country and much of what takes places is very piece-meal and short-term, and therefore community & youth workers have little time to establish relationships with the youth people and address some of the issues which exist. All in all I rather enjoyed the event and it was good to give a 'younger person' an opportunity to be on the panel.